One of the interesting changes in the new player agreement is the limit on compensation for draft choices. This places a limit on what each team can spend on their draft picks in the first 10 rounds. Exceed that limit and there are fairly stiff penalties. Stiff enough that very few, if any, teams are going to exceed them and the Twins will certainly not be one of them.
The amount a team can spend depends on their position in the draft and includes consideration of compensation picks. So the Twins should have a relatively generous budget. At least compared to other teams. The budget, however, is allocated by draft spot. If they fail to sign a player their budget is reduced accordingly. In other words they can't not sign a choice and use the money elsewhere. They can however pay someone less than budgeted for their draft spot and spend that money elsewhere. So the Twins could pick some guys who are easy to sign with their compensation picks. They could then use the money to sign their top choice or sign players they take later who dropped because of signability issues. Of course the players' agents are going to figure out what slot money is and it may be tough to get a player to take less than the budget for their draft position.
Because of the budget constraints, players who want over slot money are unlikely to be taken later in the first 10 rounds. But the budget limit disappears after the 10th round. That means that starting with the 11th round there may be some very good players available who in the past would have been taken earlier and paid over slot to sign. With the second choice, the Twins will get to choose from the best of those players. Depending on their own budget decisions, they could pick up a pretty good player that normally would have gone a lot higher.
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Thank you for this discussion. I wasn't aware of all of the details concerning the draft. It is hard to say if all of this will help the Twins or not. It probably makes budgeting easier. It might mean that more college kids get drafted after the first 100 picks or so, before the 11th round. High ceiling high school kids might think it more worthwhile to go to college and hope to end up as a much higher pick.
The other inderesting fallout of this is that I suspect that several high school and lowerclassmen college players selected in the high rounds will not sign but wait a bit for better slots in the future. Would be interesting to see how it will play. Would not be surprised if teams pick a lot of college upperclassmen in the late rounds...
I think in the past a team might have a kid who says he wants third round money or he is going to school. When the third round comes around they don't take him because they have someone they like better. Then the 4th round comes around and the kid is still available.
In the past, they might take that kid and pay him third round money. Or the kid might fall a couple more rounds before they decide its worth the risk to see if he will sign. That is going to be more difficult now. Once he starts falling, he may fall off the board until the 11th round when the only budget constraints are how much the team is willing to spend.
High school players are always seen as having more leverage since they can go to college. I am not sure this really changes that dynamic a lot. High school players have always been the guys teams tried to buy out of their college commitment.
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