The MLB draft has gone from 40 rounds to five and teams will only be allowed to offer a maximum signing bonus of $20,000 per player.
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00:00 The sports world has taken a hit from the coronavirus pandemic and it's forced Major League Baseball and its clubs to make a number of cuts to save costs.
00:10 The draft has gone from 40 rounds to 5 and although clubs will be able to pursue and sign an unlimited number of draft prospects, it comes with a cost.
00:20 Joining me now from inside the Rangers is Chris Halleck. Chris, teams will only be allowed to offer a maximum signing bonus of $20,000 per player.
00:30 For high school athletes and underclassmen, that's a big decision to make. I know you spoke with a few players from the Rangers. What was their take on this?
00:39 I spoke with Jose Trevino who's been in the Rangers organization for several years now and he specifically spoke to $20,000 and how it just doesn't go that far in the minor leagues.
00:50 There's rent, there's clubhouse dues, there's just a number of expenditures that that $20,000 is going to go away really, really quickly.
00:58 When you're looking at that small amount of money and a lot of these high school players and possibly underclassmen have college scholarships, it's probably a safer bet for them to continue on that road to go to college.
01:11 Jose Trevino also really, really stressed college education, being able to have something to fall back on in case things don't pan out with baseball because there's a lot of players that go through the minor leagues that never end up making it to the majors.
01:24 Right. So what can the MLB do, though, to incentivize players to come and play for only this $20,000 maximum cap?
01:33 A lot of big league clubs will look at it as like, "Okay, this is your foot in the door now." Who knows what the situation's going to be throughout the rest of the year or even next year.
01:42 We're still in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and big league clubs could be like, "This is your chance to play professional baseball now."
01:48 Taylor Hearn, another Rangers player who's been in the system for a while, he says that this kind of looks at it as like this is an investment.
01:59 If you're going to invest only $20,000 into what you're doing right now, then you need to be really, really good in the short term so that teams continue to invest money in you.
02:07 Because, again, this is a situation where we don't know what's going to happen for the rest of this year or next year.
02:13 We do know that this is going to be very damaging to the game of baseball, possibly in both the short term and the long term.
02:19 All right. Yeah, using it somewhat as motivation. It's a hard decision to make, but really appreciate your insight on this. Thank you, Chris.
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