With the 2020 MLB draft being only five rounds, undrafted free agents are a dime a dozen this year, and tracking their landing spots has been intriguing.
When it comes to the impact draft picks have on their team, baseball is different from basketball and football. In baseball, drafts picks do not make an immediate impact at the major league level. Watching them develop through the minor league system is as exciting as when they make the leap to the big club. In the past we’ve done this with late round draft picks, watching their accent through the system. This year we get to do this as undrafted free agents sign.
One of my favorite parts of the professional football draft is when the last pick is announced, the feeding frenzy on undrafted free agents begins. We have never experienced this in professional baseball. For players not taken in the forty round draft, if they are lucky to sign a contract, they do so with little fanfare.
This year has been different and for baseball fans who are trying to distract themselves from the on again-off again negotiations between the owners and player’s association, tracking the undrafted free agent signings has been ideal.
Here's my best way to explain the Royals' Sunday. They turned a 5-round draft into a 10-round draft. The players got $20K bonuses max instead of significantly more than that because of the current signing rules, but Kansas City cleaned up.https://t.co/k5L9HpKfQu
— JJ Cooper (@jjcoop36) June 15, 2020
Baseballamerica.com has been updating where undrafted players have been signing on a regular basis.
The Kansas City Royals have signed six players since the window opened Sunday for undrafted free agents to sign, and every one of them appears on the Baseball America Top 500 Prospect List.
The Washington Nationals drafted Mitchell Parker in the fifth round of the draft, out of San Jacinto Junior College. They recently signed his battery mate, Raymond Torres Jr., as an undrafted free agent.
In some ways signing as an underrated free agent can be better for players. If they are drafted in the later rounds, they’ll earn the same signing bonus as they potentially get this year ($20,000 max). The players who go undrafted are able to sign with whatever team they choose, giving them options to find the best fit for them.
While we await a conclusion to the major league bickering, we can at least track the minor league signings of undrafted free agents.