How the Yankees could change MLB draft strategy forever - ESPN

Baseball's draft can be pretty predictable. Not on a pick-to-pick basis — no prognosticator can predict even half of the picks right, and that includes the scouts and execs making some of the picks — but on the whole, things go as expected. There are slot values associated with every pick, and those add up to a club's total bonus pool. The vast majority of picks sign for basically that suggested amount, and under the draft rules of the past two CBAs, a team has never gone more than 5% over its entire pool (because that's where penalties begin). Only rarely does one spend more than 5% below its pool.

But, to be clear: The rules don't include a hard spending cap. Teams can spend whatever they want in the draft — and, as a matter of fact, there is an amount a team could spend where the penalties would be worth it.

If you're interested in the nitty gritty, Jeff Passan wrote about this concept four years ago when these draft rules were still new in the previous CBA. The basic idea is that if a team goes 15% over its draft pool, it would lose its next two first round picks. I'll go into more detail below on what a haul could look like if a team was willing to spend far over its pool amount, but the broad strokes would be a team with one of the lowest draft pools landing seven or so players who landed between roughly 15 and 60 on its internal version of my rankings — let's call it one or two players in the 15-to-30 range then five or six more in the top 60. They'd likely come heavily from the high school class where team-by-team evaluations can vary greatly outside of the top tier of players (and where such shenanigans are more feasible than with college players).

Scouts and execs from a number of teams have told me their clubs