St. Louis Cardinals News: MLB Draft will be just five rounds

Everything for the MLB Draft was mostly confirmed except for the number of rounds. As of Friday evening, the St. Louis Cardinals will have just five rounds.

It seems that Major League Baseball enjoys pushing fans, players, and ultimately money away from the sport. They’d never say it. That can’t be their ultimate goal, but continually they do things that just don’t make sense. This time might take the cake though. The St. Louis Cardinals will just get five rounds to fill their minor leagues in 2020. Ridiculous.

We all knew things would be different with the draft this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic cutting the college and high school baseball seasons short. The MLB conceded that players get another full year of service time, regardless of how long or short the 2020 season is. Now, they are trying to clutch their purses in other areas.

I get that a 40-round draft was unrealistic, but going all the way to five rounds is too far. From rounds six to 40, there was $61M spent. That sounds like a lot, but remember that that’s between every team. That’s just over $2M per team.

Going further, from rounds five to 10, teams collectively spent $29,578,100 last year. So, for less than $1M a team, they are telling 150 players that have plenty of chance to make the MLB that they will only be able to make a max of $20k right off the bat.

It’s $20k because, for some reason, that’s what the owners decided the maximum would be. It’s saving money for owners at all costs.

Last year, the final pick of the 10th round of the MLB draft had a signing bonus of $142,200. Why in the hell does $20,000 make sense? A limit would be okay because if not, teams could start bidding wars for certain players and potentially end up spending more than they would usually, but $20k? It’s ridiculous.

So what does all of this mean, what happens because of this. Well, we are going to see a lot of players return to college or go to college (for high schoolers). We are also going to see a lot of good players still available after the draft ends. If players can’t go back to college for another year, they’ll be forced to either sign for $20k or give up baseball completely.

Those are just the players on the Cardinals. There are tons of players scattered around the league who wouldn’t have been drafted in 2020.

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The biggest question is whether or not this signing bonus cap will become a normal thing. Already, the 2021 MLB Draft will be 20 rounds, but it will significantly hurt the game if this cap is held in place. Why? If you are a fringe player, the MLB pulling money out of the sport for incoming players disincentivizes playing baseball.

The MLB is just telling kids to go play another sport.

With zero income coming in right now for owners, it makes sense to cut the draft down, but the way they are doing it is just hurting the players who are the future of the game.

Thankfully for the Cardinals, they have seven picks in the first five rounds, so they will have a chance to get some good impact talent, but the disappointment in this deal around the league is huge. It just seems like it didn’t need to be this bad.