MLB proposes removing high school players from draft and cutting bonus pools to $200M

What happened

Major League Baseball has proposed a wholesale restructuring of its domestic amateur-entry system, per ESPN's Jeff Passan. The proposal, which emerged Thursday, would remove high school players from the draft entirely, make college players eligible to declare after their sophomore seasons, shorten the draft from 20 rounds to 12, and reduce the total bonus pool from $358.7 million to $200 million.

The proposal is not a rule change — it is a proposal, and the distinction matters. Nothing in Passan's reporting indicates the measure has been adopted, ratified, or agreed to by any relevant party. What exists, as of the reporting, is a formal MLB proposal that would, if passed, fundamentally alter how the league acquires amateur talent domestically.

Why it matters

The draft-round math alone tells part of the story. A 20-round draft becoming a 12-round draft is not a trim; it is a restructuring of the entire pipeline through which amateur players enter professional baseball. Fewer rounds mean fewer players selected, fewer players receiving professional contracts through the draft process, and a sharper concentration of resources at the top of the board.

The high school exclusion is the most structurally significant piece. Per Yahoo Sports, the 2025 MLB Draft saw 96 high school prospects selected and signed. Under the proposed system, those players would not be draft-eligible at all. The path for a high school player to reach professional baseball — at least through the domestic draft — would, per the proposal, no longer exist in its current form. What alternative routes might exist for those players is not addressed in Passan's reporting.

The college eligibility change runs in a different direction. The proposal would allow players to declare after their sophomore year, which would accelerate the timeline for college talent entering the professional system. For college programs, that is a meaningful shift: a player who might have spent three or four years developing within a college program could now be eligible to leave after two.

The bonus pool reduction — from $358.7 million to $200 million — is the financial architecture underlying all of it. A shorter draft with fewer high school players and a dramatically reduced pool means the dollars available to sign amateur talent would shrink substantially under the proposal. How that reduction would be distributed across the 12 rounds, and what it would mean for slot values at the top of the draft, is not detailed in the reporting.

The numbers

The figures in the proposal, as reported by Passan via ESPN, are specific enough to anchor the conversation. The current bonus pool sits at $358.7 million across the league. The proposed pool would be $200 million. The draft would contract from 20 rounds to 12. And the 2025 draft produced 96 high school players who were selected and signed, per Yahoo Sports — a concrete measure of the population that would be removed from draft eligibility under the proposal.

Those numbers, taken together, describe a system that is smaller, faster, and more concentrated than the one currently in place. Whether that is the intended effect or a byproduct of other structural goals is not addressed in the reporting.

What we don't know yet

The reporting does not indicate who would need to approve the proposal, what the timeline for any decision might be, or whether there is opposition from clubs, players, college programs, or any other stakeholder. The proposal's treatment of high school players raises an obvious downstream question — what happens to those players? — that the reporting does not answer. Would they be eligible for international signing mechanisms? Would a separate domestic signing pathway exist? Per Yahoo Sports, the reporting does not say.

The college sophomore eligibility piece also carries open questions. The current system's structure around junior eligibility exists in part because of NCAA rules governing amateur status, and any change to draft eligibility would interact with those rules in ways the reporting does not address. Whether the proposal accounts for that interaction, or whether it would require parallel changes at the NCAA level, is not detailed.

The bonus pool reduction raises its own set of questions about distribution. A $200 million pool across 12 rounds is a different animal than $358.7 million across 20, but the reporting does not detail how slot values would be set, whether competitive balance picks would be preserved, or how the reduction would affect the negotiating leverage of top picks.

What to watch

The immediate question is whether this proposal moves toward any formal vote or negotiation process, and who the relevant parties are. The reporting identifies this as an MLB proposal, which means the next development to watch is any response — from the players' association, from college baseball's governing bodies, or from clubs themselves.

The figure of 96 high school players signed in the 2025 draft is a useful reference point for tracking how the conversation develops. Advocates for high school players and their families, as well as scouts and development staff whose work centers on that population, would have obvious standing in any debate over the proposal. Whether those voices surface in subsequent reporting is worth monitoring.

The sophomore eligibility piece will draw attention from college coaches and programs, for whom the recruiting and roster-management implications are significant. A player who can leave after two years is a different planning variable than one committed through three.

And the bonus pool figure — $200 million — will be the financial floor around which any negotiation is likely to orbit. Whether that number represents a genuine opening position or a ceiling the league is prepared to defend is, for now, unknown.

Per ESPN's Jeff Passan, the proposal was put forward Thursday. What comes next is, at this point, unwritten.