MLB News: Owners propose major changes to MLB Draft
· Yahoo Sports
As part of the current collective bargaining agreement talks, Major League Baseball has proposed a radical overhaul of the MLB Draft. The changes include not only the introduction of an international draft (which MLB has been advocating for a while) but the end of draft eligibility for high school players and the ability to trade picks. The proposal would also reduce the number of rounds in the draft from 20 to 12 and come with major restrictions on the amount of money teams could give out in amateur bonuses.
J.J. Cooper at Baseball America has an excellent overview of the changes and the effects that it would have. Unfortunately, much of that article is behind a paywall. Bob Nightengale at USA Today has a piece on the proposed draft changes as does Mike Axisa at CBS Sports for those of you who don’t have a BA subscription. Evan Drellich also has a piece on the changes at The Athletic for those of you with a subscription to that.
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Let’s go through the changes one by one to see what MLB is proposing.
Reducing the number of rounds in the draftMLB has been slowly chipping away at the number of rounds in the draft for years. Up until 1986, there were two separate drafts, one in June and one in January. Then for years the draft in June would continue as long as teams still wanted to make picks. Then it became a 50-round draft, which was reduced to a 40-round draft that was once again reduced to the current 20 rounds in 2021.
MLB is now proposing that the draft be reduced to 12 rounds. They are also proposing that any undrafted player be limited to a $10,000 signing bonus. Currently, MLB teams are allowed to give up to $125,000 to any undrafted amateur without it counting against their bonus pool. They can even give a player more if they have leftover bonus pool money.
The obvious impact of this is that it would disincentivize marginal prospects from starting a professional career. While most baseball players don’t get the kinds of NIL money in college that football and basketball players get and sometimes they don’t even get full scholarships, ten thousand dollars is not much of an incentive to give up the chance to play in college.
I think it’s a fair question as to how many rounds the draft should last, but the hard cap of $10,000 on amateur free agents is clearly punitive. You can argue that players not taken in the first 12 rounds don’t have much of a chance at making the majors anyway, but Cubs catching prospect Owen Ayers was a 19th-round pick in 2024 and signed for $50,000. He’s now listed on several Top 100 prospect lists. Would Ayers have signed if he hadn’t been drafted and only offered 10k? Who knows? But this system would certainly save the owners a lot of money, even if it might cost MLB some talented players.
International DraftThis one is the least surprising because MLB has been proposing it for a long time. The last CBA had an agreement that the owners and the players would discuss adopting an international draft, but they were unable to come to an agreement. To be fair, everyone agrees that the current system of talent acquisition in (mostly) Latin America is broken. Teams are coming to “handshake” agreements for millions of dollars with 12- and 13-year-old kids from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. No one thinks that’s a good thing. The question has always been whether an international draft is a cure worse than the disease.
So MLB is proposing two 12-round drafts, one for players from the US and Canada and one for international players. There would be an equal bonus pool for both the international and domestic draft.
The argument in favor of the international draft is that everyone realizes that it’s insane to offer 12-year-olds a million dollars (to be paid, maybe, in four years) under the table. The argument against it is that under the current system, the buscones who identify and train Latin American players and the teams that offer them money under the table have a real incentive to develop those players into the best players they can be. Those incentives would go away (or at least greatly lessen) under a draft, where any team could scoop up another team’s hard work with an earlier pick.
Bonus pool moneyWith this draft, the owners are proposing a massive reduction in the amount of money that could be offered in amateur bonuses. Currently, the 30 MLB teams spend around a collective $600 million a year on player signing bonuses. Under this proposal, there would be $200 million (split 30 ways) for domestic bonuses and $200 million (again split) for international bonuses. This money would also count against any salary cap that would be agreed to in the collective bargaining talks.
Hard draft slotNo longer would teams negotiate with players over what their signing bonus would be. Players would be required to accept the MLB mandates slot bonus for their pick. This would end some players holding out for more money and teams drafting several players who agree to sign for cheap in the later rounds to even things out. Since most players who want overslot bonuses are high school players, this might not have a big impact because of the next proposal.
Age restrictionsHere’s the big one. Currently, there are several points where players become eligible to sign with a major league team. International players become eligible at 16. An American player becomes eligible when they graduate from high school, which is usually at age 18 but sometimes as young as 17. If they don’t sign out of high school and enroll in a four-year college, they they have to wait until after their junior year until they are eligible to be drafted again. Which is usually at age 21. There are a few draft-eligible sophomores, which we don’t need to go into here.
However, if they sign with a junior college out of high school, they become eligible for the draft after every season. So a player can be eligible to be signed at 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 or 21 years old, depending on their circumstances.
What MLB is proposing is that international players become eligible for the draft at 18 and US/Canada players become eligible at 20. So high school players would no longer be eligible to be drafted and almost all college players could be drafted after their sophomore seasons.
This move would be a major boon for college baseball. Instead of Pete Crow-Armstrong being drafted by the Mets in the first round, he would have gone to Vanderbilt for two years. Current Cubs top prospect Josiah Hartshorn would have just finished up his freshman season at Texas A&M.
For MLB, this would push a lot of the costs of development onto the NCAA. It would also mean an end to elite players making their major-league debut at 19 and 20 and then becoming free agents at 26 or 27, when they get the massive contracts. The Pirates’ Konnor Griffith, rather than being a Rookie-of-the-Year candidate, would have just finished up his sophomore year at LSU and would be a likely candidate for the first pick in the draft this July.
But the goal of NCAA programs isn’t to develop players. It’s to win ballgames. As one unnamed scouting director was quoted as saying in Nightengale’s article, most college freshmen don’t even play. Sure, they get training and coaching outside of games, but for all but the most elite prospects, such a proposal would mean players missing at least a year of development. MLB probably doesn’t have a problem with the elite players being drafted at 20, the solid prospects drafted at 21 and the rest at 22. The union likely does.
It’s also been noted that it seems unfair that international players can sign at 18 and US/Canada players have to wait until they’re 20. International players could still make the majors at 20 and 21 while American players could not.
Trading draft picksCurrently, only competitive balance picks are eligible to be traded. MLB is proposing that all draft picks are eligible to be dealt with some limitations.
- A pick could not be traded more than a year in advance. So a team could not trade a 2027 draft pick until after the 2026 draft was concluded.
- Teams could “trade up” or “down” during the first round, and first round only, of the draft as it is underway. It wouldn’t have to be only first-round picks involved in deals, but the ability to trade picks would end after the first round ended.
- No team could trade away their first-round pick two years in a row, and no team could acquire more than three extra picks in the first three rounds of any draft.
- Competitive balance picks would be eliminated.
- The draft lottery, established in the last CBA, would be reduced from the first six picks to the first four picks.
- No team could get a lottery (top four) pick three years in a row. Other current restrictions would be eliminated.
- Medical evaluations at the MLB Draft combines would go from optional to mandatory for all draft-eligible players. Currently a player can opt out of a physical, but then the team that drafts him is not required to make them a minimum bonus offer.
There’s also a weird rule designed to increased the watchability of the MLB Draft on television. Ten players designated by MLB would be required to attend the draft in person. They would be paid $50,000 for their troubles.
These rules aren’t really pro or anti-player. They seem mostly designed to increase interest in the draft. Should interest in college baseball increase because of MLB’s new age limits, that could have a positive impact on public interest in the draft as well.
The Minor Leagues?With the draft dropping back to 12 rounds and severe restrictions on the non-drafted players that often fill out every minor league roster, there is some suspicion that MLB would like to eliminate yet another level of minor league baseball in this provision. They insist that they will keep the number of teams in affiliated baseball at 120, at least through 2040. MLB feels confident that they can fill out their 165 minor league roster spots under this new system.
There’s a lot to digest here. Pretty much all of it is, other than trading draft picks, beneficial to the owners and against the players’ interests. There is no way the union accepts this proposal as offered and the owners likely know that. It’s an opening bid. But it is a sign that the owners want to radically restructure the way baseball talent is identified, signed and developed in the years to come.