‘What’s he worth? Make your case’: Villanova law students win baseball arbitration competition

Baseball arbitration proceedings are some of the most tense scenes in sports. On one side, a player and his agents argue for a higher salary. On the other, his team lists reasons why that player is worth less, all while remaining civil enough to maintain its relationship with the player.

Several Villanova law students conduct these mock arbitration hearings for fun. And they’re really good at it.

Three members of Villanova’s Sports Law Negotiation Team (SLNT), David Brake, Alex Shaff, and Alyssa Rodarte, last month won the International Baseball Arbitration Competition hosted by Tulane University in New Orleans. The Villanova trio defeated 40 teams from law schools across the country in the Jan. 18-19 competition judged by a panel consisting of agents, union representatives, and front office members.

“For me, my dream was [just to compete in] it,” said Brake, who competed multiple times and performed better each year. “… To have it peak like that was a very goose bumps type of feeling.”

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Teams representing Villanova’s Charles Widger School of Law have been participants in the competition, held annually since 2007, in addition to similar Tulane competitions for football, soccer, hockey, and basketball. SLNT made the semifinals in three of the past four baseball competitions, but this was Villanova’s first win.

Teams were given the names of three arbitration-eligible Major League Baseball players and 30 other players to calculate the market. Players are eligible for arbitration when they have three or more years (but fewer than six) of service time in the major leagues.

The students had about a month to develop arguments for a player, a team, and both sides for a third player. Teams had three matchups on the competition’s first day, with eight teams advancing to the quarterfinals. Participants had a couple of days to prepare for the first round, but in the quarterfinals and onward, teams were assigned to a side of the argument and given just 30 minutes before presenting.

The first day went smoothly. With much less time to prepare, Day 2 was more chaotic. The team got to work in a small conference room, studying its own prepared arguments while making adjustments based on the other team’s rebuttals.

“You’re all making the same argument, but there’s different aspects of the argument that you have to present,” Rodarte said. “The presentation has to look decent. You have to also correlate it based on [the other team’s materials]. You have to essentially have a script [but] pretend like you’re not reading from a script. … Those 30 minutes are like a checklist of things that we have to tackle from different angles.”

The team faced a surprising opponent in the semifinals: Villanova’s Charles Widger School of Law. The SLNT had submitted a second team composed of second-year students Carl Capizzi, Zach Cioffi, and George Pla. Brake and Shaff spent the fall teaching the second-year students about baseball arbitration and the competition, but then they faced their teammates in the semifinals.

“In a perfect world, I guess you’d like both in different brackets to have the possibility of [an all-Villanova] final,” said Villanova law professor Andrew Brandt, a former Green Bay Packers vice president of player finance and general counsel, and the SLNT adviser and executive director of Villanova’s Moorad Center for Sports Law. “… It’s a real kind of mentor-mentee relationship.”

Though the younger Villanova team performed well, the mentors advanced.

Villanova advanced to the championship round for the first time, which brought one more surprise. While SLNT had been assigned to the player side of negotiations for Texas Rangers outfielder Adolis Garcia in the first two playoffs, it was responsible for the team’s side in the final. After arguing Garcia was “the greatest thing since sliced bread” all day, as Brake put it, they then had to argue he wasn’t quite that great.

They got the final word. After 30 minutes of preparation, their opponent from the University of Texas presented its argument. Brake presented his. As Texas issued its rebuttal, Rodarte fed Shaff quotes to use from their argument, all while Shaff feverishly readied her own. They crammed until Shaff went up to the podium, presenting to more than a dozen judges and a room full of eliminated competitors.

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When she concluded, the judges left for 20 minutes, which Brake said “felt like an eternity.” They announced the competition winner last. Villanova won the team award and Shaff was named best orator.

“I did not see that coming at all,” Shaff said. “I’m not a very outgoing person in general. But I think for this competition … I’m not going up there to be Alex Shaff. I’m going up there to represent Adolis Garcia or represent the Texas Rangers. It’s like [being] a different person.”

They were congratulated by judges, one of whom even asked if they’d had outside counsel (they hadn’t). They even appeared on MLB Network’s Hot Stove with competition judge Mark Feinsand, a reporter for MLB.com.

Is a career in baseball next for the trio? Brake, a lifelong Cardinals fan from St. Louis, wants to work for a players’ union one day. Shaff, who is from Georgia, always thought she’d work in tax law, but the SLNT’s success (and her own) has made her reconsider. Now, she thinks she wants to work in the Atlanta Braves’ front office. Rodarte, who is from Los Angeles, has similar plans with the Dodgers but first will aim to win the Tulane competition again next year.

Of course, those goals would mean Rodarte and Shaff could face Brake in arbitration hearings in the future. If this competition is any indication, both sides would be lucky to have them.