Some in baseball think an international draft could address corruption. Creating one isn't that easy

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.

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.”

Without the draft, teams spent $181 million on international amateurs in 2024, about $10 million less than MLB’s proposal, and have spent $199 million this year, when MLB’s guarantee was projected to grow to $208 million.

Just 6% of international amateurs signed from 2012-16 reached the major leagues and only 30% among those who signed for seven-figures bonuses, a 2023 MLB study found.

Clark doesn't think a draft is necessary to address what's wrong in Latin America.

“You have clubs and scouts on the ground that are looking at a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old that’s otherwise going to be eligible three years from now,” Clark said, “and suggesting to that 12-year-old verbally, I will gladly assign you to `X' amount of dollars but you have to take yourself off the market. So we have a verbal agreement which isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. But that’s happening.”

“In a world where the teams are literally engaging kids and their parents that young, what kid or what parent or what trainer isn’t going to listen to that conversation?” Clark said. “Well, the league could address that right now. They could have addressed it yesterday, but they’re not going to. And then they’re using that to suggest at the end of the day the only thing that’s going to fix it is a draft where nobody knows who’s going to be where.”

An international draft is also just one of dozens of issues on the table when MLB and the MLBPA bargain. One crucial element is MLB ties its proposal on international amateur spending to a provision impacting what teams spend on major league free agents.

Top players are routinely extended qualifying offers by their former teams when they become free agents — a one-year deal with a salary of the average of the top 125 players. If players turn down that deal and sign with another team, that new club loses one or two amateur draft picks and possibly international signing bonus allocation.

For some free agents, especially those approaching and past age 30, qualifying offers have dampened bidding. Scott Boras cited the market for third baseman Matt Chapman and pitchers Blake Snell and Nick Martinez.

“The teams just won’t give up the draft pick and the international money and pay true free agent value,” he said. “For the majority of these guys, the qualifying offer for a 30-year-old player and above is restricted free agency, it is not free agency.”

MLB offered to drop the qualifying offer system three years ago while bargaining for the international draft, but it didn't sway the players. But it could again be part of the conversation around the next CBA.

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