MLB’s decision to cut this year’s draft to five rounds, reported yesterday by Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich, comes after one offer to the union for a longer draft, which several sources told me would have been 12 rounds, with severely curtailed bonuses after Round 5 and limited ability to sign undrafted players. MLB chose not to come back to the table with a second proposal, as its agreement with the union in March allowed it to unilaterally impose a five-round draft with other restrictions.
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With the current financial situation and uncertainty of when, or if, we will see baseball this year, as well as the likelihood that we’ll see little to no minor-league baseball this summer, some reduction in the draft made sense from a player development standpoint, and it saves MLB teams some cash in the short term. But this decision to essentially draft and sign as few players as possible could have significant long-term consequences for players and teams alike, most of them not good.
The most obvious impact is that we’ll see a lot of good players who had some major-league potential go undrafted this year. Paul Goldschmidt (Round 8) and Jacob deGrom (Round 9) were drafted after the fifth round out of four-year colleges; at the time, they were not seen as good enough prospects to go in the top 150 picks, even though history has shown they were among the very best players in their respective draft classes.
In a five-round draft, college juniors like Goldschmidt and deGrom would have been undrafted and left to choose whether to sign as free agents for a relative pittance ($20,000 this year), go back to school to come back out as seniors/fourth-year juniors (and potentially get $5,000 or less if they didn’t improve their standing) or go play independent ball and hope to boost their value (which might not be an option in 2020 if independent leagues can’t play). All of those options are worse than what such players would have gotten in a normal draft, and we risk losing players entirely. Perhaps instead of perennial MVP candidate Paul Goldschmidt, we’d have Paul Goldschmidt, CPA.
There’s a big ripple effect from players who expected to sign going back to school or going to college from high school. Division I schools have only 11.7 scholarships per team, and coaches plan to distribute those under the assumption that some juniors will not return for their senior years and that some of their top recruits will never reach campus. Some members of both groups will now be at school, fighting for the same playing time and the same limited scholarships, which will squeeze some players out of lineups, out of scholarships or off rosters entirely.
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This could be a boon for junior college baseball, at least where such schools still have the resources to operate teams next spring, as they could welcome any top high school prospects who aren’t drafted and offer them the chance to play for one year and re-enter the draft in 2021 (or even two years, re-entering the draft in 2021 and 2022). Playing time wouldn’t be an issue, and these schools cost far less than most four-year colleges. MLB teams’ scouts would have a field day as well, since junior colleges don’t have Trackman or similar systems in place and the performance stats we get from those levels include widely varying degrees of competition.
Of course, this just amounts to kicking the can down the road. The next three draft classes will collect the spillover from this year, as some high school prospects will go to four-year colleges and stay until 2023, while others will go to two-year schools and some college juniors or draft-eligible sophomores will come back out in 2021 or 2022. That’s all good for MLB teams, who’ll have stronger draft classes next year and beyond and thus will have more potential leverage to try to negotiate discounted bonuses with picks, especially beyond the top of the first round. But it’s bad for players, who might be fighting for playing time in school and then turning around and competing with a larger-than-expected pool of players in the draft.
Any change to the draft or college scholarship availability will disproportionately hit players from disadvantaged backgrounds, reducing their choices, their opportunities to play and their potential return if and when they are drafted. It’s great to talk about increasing diversity in youth baseball and to try to get more young players of color into the sport. You have to back that up with real money, however, and this appears to work against those goals — if you’re cutting bonuses and opportunities, your talent pool will consist only of players who can afford to make little to no money while they play. Players who need incomes, or who might have been able to use a six-figure signing bonus to get by while they played in the minors, might end up leaving the sport for other careers.
The argument from MLB and its teams is that saving several hundred thousand dollars in bonus outlays this year will help them avoid furloughing current employees, with revenues likely to be diminished or nonexistent. That may be true, and nobody wants to see anyone lose their jobs even temporarily, but it’s just transferring that wealth from one underpaid group to another. MLB owners will still reap the long-term benefits from having prospects in their organizations, but now their acquisition costs will be lower. There’s also the specter of teams punting picks completely, as all selections in the first three rounds will still be “protected,” meaning that if you don’t sign the player you take with such a pick, you get a compensatory pick in the same spot in 2021. So if some team decides it doesn’t want to pay full slot for anyone in the first round when it hasn’t had a normal evaluation cycle, it could take any player it wants and offer 40 percent of the pick’s slot value. If the player declines, the team could walk away and take the extra pick in 2021, hoping that we have a normal spring season and that next year’s draft class is stronger because of all of the players who don’t sign this year. MLB teams are largely owned by billionaires, or people close to that status, and they are the ultimate beneficiaries of such savings, as well as of the added revenues that will be generated by the players they sign at discounts. And the union had already agreed to let teams defer large portions of this year’s signing bonuses into future years, which should have cleared cash flow to help keep team employees on the payroll.
There is one good argument against a longer draft this year, which is that any players MLB teams sign will have no place to play this summer or maybe even this fall. There’s talk of an extended instructional league, but that’s just speculation. I’ve heard proposals of a larger or longer Arizona Fall League, but Arizona is lagging in its response to COVID-19, ranking in the bottom five in tests conducted per capita, with cases spiking as the state rushes to reopen businesses. Many players will get back on the field sooner if they go to or stay in college, whether it’s some sort of fall ball — could MLB hold a January draft, like it did 40 years ago, for players who slipped through this year’s June draft? — or a regular spring season in 2021. Pro ball likely won’t have any opportunities for these players until next March at the soonest.
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On the whole, however, this plan helps MLB owners more than anybody else and risks us losing talented players to something other than baseball. It takes money away from some of the players who do sign, even before we consider the risk that some teams will lowball high picks and spend less than their total bonus pools. It creates potential logjams of players at four-year colleges and reduces players’ leverage in future drafts. The savings are marginal and matter in the short term — just until revenues return when games resume — more than the long term. It’s a disappointing outcome given the potential options for a longer draft that would distribute more money to players, even if the payments were deferred to next year.
(Photo of Rob Manfred: Steven Senne, File / Associated Press)
