Major League Baseball is convinced an international draft would cut down on corruption among Latin American signings, a framework the players’ association has long opposed.
“The transparency associated with the draft, the inability to make secret deals because you don’t know who’s going to draft whom, is really the best systemic approach to this problem of rules violations related to the signing market,” baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said this week. “This is not a number of player or economic issue from our perspective. It is a transparency issue associated with ending violations of our rules.”
Under the current system, MLB teams make verbal agreements with players in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and elsewhere before they are eligible to sign at 16, routinely striking handshake deals with 13- and 14-year-olds. For players not residing in the 50 U.S. states, Puerto Rico and Canada, this year’s international signing period opened in January for players born between Sept. 1, 2007, and Aug. 31, 2008.
There are concerns about loan sharking and other forms of exploitation, and MLB also has caught players committing age fraud, including a case last year in which a player who reached a verbal agreement to sign with San Diego in 2027 was 19 rather than 14.
“We have invested tens of millions of dollars on an annual basis, engaged in chasing wrongdoing and we catch people but we don’t catch everybody,” Manfred said. “And there’s probably more that goes on that we don’t catch than we do.”
Some officials in the Dominican agree with Manfred on an international draft. But because pathways into MLB’s pipeline are governed by the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and its major league players, a draft can’t be instituted until big leaguers agree.
Has an international draft been discussed during previous CBA talks?
During 2021-22 collective bargaining, MLB proposed a 20-round draft with fixed bonus amounts starting in 2024, a $191 million draft guarantee with $4 million anticipated for undrafted players.
Players countered with their first international draft proposal. They asked for a $260 million guarantee at the start, the ability to negotiate above individual bonus slot values, $8 million for undrafted players and automatic bonus increases if signings and roster spots dropped. Players also proposed a joint enforcement committee with management and had differing proposals from MLB on many of the details.
MLB’s final draft proposal was rejected by the union in July 2022, putting off the issue until bargaining to replace the labor contract that expires in December 2026.
“We don’t believe that an international draft is necessary,” union head Tony Clark said. “The international draft we proposed we believed put the framework in place to protect those players, also put the pieces in place to ensure that they receive somewhere closer to their value than they were otherwise receiving in their draft proposal or even in the current structure.”