Baseball America – July 02, 2019

68 JULY 2019 • BASEBALLAMERICA.COM

Departments

DRAFT

COLLEGIANS

PREFERRED

The bonus pool system has pushed teams

to draft more college players

by J.J. COOPER, CARLOS COLLAZO AND JARED MCMASTERS

T

he 2019 draft reinforced the notion that teams are prioritizing

college players to a higher degree than ever before.

Fifty-one of the 78 total selections on the first day came out of

four-year college programs, or roughly 65.4 percent of the draft

pool selected before the third round. That is the second-highest rate of

four-year players selected in that portion of the draft. Only the 1981 draft

(69.2 percent) was higher.

But it’s not just the top of the draft in which teams have begun prioritiz-

ing and drafting college players.

Since the late 1990s, there has been a steadily increasing trend of teams

selecting more and more college players, and it comes at the expense of

the high school and junior college prospects. That’s true of drafted players

overall, as well as players who are drafted and signed.

The Diamondbacks chose

Vanderbilt shortstop Dansby

Swanson with the No. 1 over-

all pick in the 2015 draft. That

draft class saw the highest

number of college players

ever sign pro contracts.

NORM HALL/GETTY IMAGES; BILL MITCHELL

RUNDOWN

The CBA introduced

a bonus pool system

that compels teams

to load up on college

seniors in order to

save money to meet

the asking prices of

top draft picks.

But there’s another reason

speeding up the trend. The cur-

rent draft system has created an

environment that leads teams to

sign college players instead of high

school players. There’s an obvious

jump in the percentage of college

players that occurs in 2012. This

is because the current Collective

Bargaining Agreement introduced

a signing bonus pool that compels

teams to load up on college seniors

in rounds six through 10 in order

to create more financial flexibility

to meet the asking

prices of the top

draft picks.

Figure 1 shows

the percentage of

players drafted from

each source among

the top 10 rounds,

including data from

the 2019 class.

Maybe more

importantly for the

trend lines, that 2012 draft was the

first time that teams were unable

to spend freely in rounds 11-40.

Under the previous draft sys-

tem, if the Reds wanted to give

basketball player Amir Garrett $1

million to sign in the 22nd round

or the Orioles wanted to hand Zach

Davies $575,000 as a 26th-round-

er, they could and did so. Garrett

would have been an extremely

risky early-round pick—there was

no guarantee he would sign and

he hadn’t even played competitive

baseball during his senior year

of high school. But the Reds were

able to spend money, while also

There was a dip in the four-year

signing percentage in the late

1980s. This was caused when the

January draft was eliminated in

1987 and as a result more junior

college players were taken in the

June draft.

Since the 1981 draft, approxi-

mately two-thirds of all drafted

players who have signed contracts

have been products of four-year

colleges. (This data excludes the

2019 draft class, since we don’t yet

know who will sign.) High school

players make up about 22 percent,

and the remaining 11.4 percent

consists of junior college players.

In the last five drafts, the per-

centage of signed draftees com-

ing out of four-year schools has

ranged from 75.5 to 78.3 percent.

There are a number of reasons for

this trend. Multiple teams have

told Baseball America that they are

more likely to pass on high school

pitchers at the top of the draft

because of the recent struggles of

that demographic. And teams have

a much more robust data set for

college players thanks to a deeper

statistical résumé and troves of

analytical data from TrackMan to a

depth that isn’t always possible to

acquire with high school players.

Both of those reasons can push

teams to take more college players.

The increase in college players

taken in the first two rounds this

year would seem to indicate there

is something to this trend.

spending very little draft capital

(only a 22nd-round pick in 2011).

It would be nearly impossible to

sign Garrett in a similar situation

now. Finding $1 million or more

to spend in the late rounds of the

draft requires saving significant

money on bonuses in the top 10

rounds. In 2011, there were three

high school players who received

$1 million or larger bonuses

after the 10th round. Since then,

there have been only two in the

past six drafts combined: Chad

McClanahan and

Cameron Planck, a

pair of 11th-rounders

in the 2016 draft.

The 2011 draft was

the last year of the

old draft system. In

2011, there were 76

high school play-

ers who received

$500,000 or more.

There were 50 in the

top three rounds. There were an

additional 26 high school play-

ers drafted after the third round

who received $500,000 or more,

including 21 taken in the fifth

round or later. Moving back to

2010, there were 63 high school

draftees who signed for $500,000

or more, including 18 from the

fifth round on.

In 2018, even with nearly a

decade’s worth of inflation push-

ing up bonuses, there were just 58

high school players who received

bonuses of $500,000 or more.

Under the new draft format, teams

have averaged signing 59 high

100%

— YEAR —

College High School Junior College

75%

50%

25%

0%

1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

FIG. 1

PERCENTAGE OF PLAYERS DRAFTED IN TOP 10 ROUNDS