SEATTLE — LSU center fielder Dylan Crews had “one of the greatest offensive seasons in college baseball history.” He entered the draft season “right there with Adley Rutschman for the best college hopeful in recent memory.” He was ranked among the top talents in the 2023 MLB Draft by Baseball Prospectus, Baseball America, FanGraphs and The Athletic.
But on Sunday morning, the Pittsburgh Pirates were expected to look the other way with the pick — a notion they confirmed by making Crews’ teammate, dominant pitcher Paul Skenes, the No. 1 pick overall. Crews left the board at No. 2 Washington Nationals, a team that’s been willing to do big to sign elite college players in the past.
It may seem foreign to followers of the more familiar drafts of the NFL or NBA, but even when a consensus best player emerges in baseball, he’s not a lock to go first overall.
In other words, there is no Victor Wembanyama effect in the MLB Draft. There are a variety of reasons for this, some of which are distinct from this draft class and some that are characteristic of the MLB amateur draft each year.
Slot machine values, bonus pools and math at the heart of MLB draft strategy
The first thing you need to understand is how MLB’s drafting system creates a game of financial Tetris. Each team has a lump sum they are allowed to spend in the first 10 rounds, called the bonus pool. This total is constructed from the dollar numbers assigned by MLB, called slot values, for each of their picks during these rounds. But while the picks match those slot values, recruits don’t necessarily receive that amount. Teams can distribute the total pool as they see fit.
They can even spend more than their assigned amount, if they are willing to accept the resulting penalties. Spending more than the allotted bonus pool by 5% or less means paying a 75% tax on the excess money, and about half the league does so in any draft, according to MLB.com’s Jim Callis. . Beyond that 5% threshold, teams begin to lose their future picks, a penalty extreme enough that no team has ever dared to incur it.
Within these guidelines, front offices attempt to maximize the talent they can bring to their system with their total dollar amount. Scouting has advanced and targeted top talent more successfully in recent years, but baseball’s amateur ranks are undeniably harder to judge than football’s or basketball’s. The level of competition varies enormously, especially for high school players. A team may only have a few looks at a young prospect before offering them millions to join the organization.
So while picking the best possible player is imperative, bounty is often the name of the game. Teams at the top of the draft rarely pay full slot value to these rookies. Instead, they save the money and use it to enrich deals to players at the bottom of the first round or second round – often high school kids torn between going pro and going to college who might be swayed by a bonus. boosted.
In theory, successfully threading that needle could mean scoring two of the top 15 or 20 talents available even if your second pick isn’t before pick #35.
This year, the overall first-pick slot value is $9,721,000, and the Pirates overall bonus pool is a league-best $16,185,700. That’s the benefit of winning the new draft lottery, but that’s only as far as the front office can stretch it.
Dylan Crews wasn’t trying to ‘make a deal’
There is a negotiation calculus going on on both sides.
Crews and his reps want to land him the biggest bonus possible — possibly close to $10 million and quite possibly the biggest bonus in draft history. They might have a favorite destination. They could just make tactical moves to boost his eventual salary. As ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel aptly explained in a mock draft in late June, the motivations of the crews matter less than the implications. He is looking for over $9.7 million to sign. Although he is unlikely to follow through on the threat to return to school for his senior season, the obvious tough stance from rumors circulating in scouting circles has indicated that a team picking him must be at the comfortable either pony up that amount from their bonus pool or live with that uncertainty for the rest of the draft. And that last bit is the important part.
Teams trying to successfully play 3D chess of slot machine values and bonus pools are looking for a degree of certainty that players and their advisors don’t have to provide. Recognizing the less singular nature of baseball players in general – no matter how good the crews, there is no instant franchise changer a la Victor Wembanyama or LeBron James in baseball – teams will often go after the best player who will “make a deal”. This basically means accepting a bonus amount – or at least a range – before the draft.
In practice, that can mean relatively minor savings on slot values, like when the Baltimore Orioles signed 2022 first-round pick Jackson Holliday for around $600,000 below the slot. Or it can be much more extreme, like when the Orioles saved over $2.5 million from their pool with No. 2 overall pick Heston Kjerstad.
The Pirates themselves executed him in 2021, signing No. 1 overall pick Henry Davis – who recently made his major league debut – for nearly $2 million less than the machine’s value slot.
It remains to be seen how much lower the Skenes deal will be than the slot and how the Pirates will deploy the savings, but the tactic is commonplace.
He’s also particularly attractive in the deep draft, where there are multiple high-level options, which was very much the case in 2023. In reality, the space between Crews, Skenes, the University of Florida outfielder Wyatt Langford (who rose to No. 4 at the Texas Rangers) and even top high schoolers Max Clark (No. 3 in the Tigers) and Walker Jenkins (No. 5 in the Twins) weren’t that great.
Baseball America and other ratings considered it a “loaded” draft, the best in over a decade. Skenes’ stellar showing in the Men’s College World Series was just the latest development in a class that could immediately put three of the new pros into the sport’s top 10 prospects: Crews, Skenes and Langford.
The Pirates will now work on a kind of reverse of global process #1. Instead of finding a player willing to take up less space, they will seek out some of their favorite possible recruits who might be available in their future pick lineup – No. 42, No. 67 and No. 73 – and ask them to make essentially what Crews would have done: make contractual demands that other clubs either can’t or won’t meet. Then they’ll swoop in, offer them slot deals, and hope the combination of talent alongside Skenes is worth the bet they’ve taken passing on Crews.