Major League Baseball has apparently made it its mission to reduce the amount of money teams can spend on international and amateur talent. There are now hard caps and slots and it has made it much harder for teams to build on the cheap as opposed to going out into the free agent market. Because, after all, even without the signing caps, far less overall money was spent on international free agents and amateurs than on established major leaguers.
Well, now they’re reducing the international money even further. Ben Badler of Baseball America reports that teams will have $300,000 less to spend on international signees beginning in the 2014-15 signing period.
That reduction comes in the form of the up to six $50,000 exempted bonuses available to each team. The way those worked was, if the team had tapped out its entire overall signing bonus pool, they could offer up to $50,000 to six players who they may have missed previously. Now that’s being eliminated.
What the point of all of that is is beyond me, but it seems crazy to me that Major League Baseball thinks it’s priority to take a mere $50K away from some kid in the Dominican Republic when so much more money -- multiples of 1000 or more -- is being spent elsewhere.
