For more than a year now, one of the top questions for Orioles fans to wonder about has been: When are they going to call up Adley Rutschman? The structure of baseball’s rules about when a player can become a free agent have always pointed to a callup three weeks or so into the 2022 season. MLB’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement presents new incentives for teams to call up their Rutschman-level players. That changes the question to: Will any of the new rules change their mind?
The basic structure in the rules that allows for teams to manipulate the service time of their young players is unchanged.