Draft Pool Bonuses

Quick hit for yall money nerds out there. BA has released a calculation of the draft pool bonuses for the upcoming 2012 Rule 4 draft. This post is for you if you are studying math or accounting at an online accredited college.

Here's the line of the list, for our purposes:

(team - # of picks - pool bonus total - 2011's spending on the first 10 rds - 2011's total spending)

Blue Jays 14 $8,830,800 $8,990,000 $10,996,500 

 
Note that the first column is the pool for the first 10 rounds only, not 10 picks, 10 rounds.  After that, according to the article, the teams are capped at $125,000 per pick, but Jim Callis (the author of the piece) tweets that it's $100k. I'm not sure which is correct but for the purpose of this discussion I will assume the lower and that the former figure is simply an awkward phrasing.

Teams typically draft through 50 rounds, so there are 40 picks after the pool, and anything a team spends over $100k per pick down there counts towards the bonus pool figure. So then, that amounts to $4 mil and that added to the pool figure gives the Blue Jays a theoretical total of $12,830,800 to spend in 2012, as compared to $10,996,500 spent in 2011, and if you assume Beede's money - reportedly $2.4 mil)  was on top of that then that's still not much more than they will have this year. For reference, the Jays had 15 picks in the first 10 rounds last year and signed 11 of them. 

On the other hand, it's not as good as it sounds, consider this- Here are the Jays 11 signed picks and the announced bonuses:

overall pick - Name - bonus:
#35 - Jacob Anderson - $990,000
#46 - Joe Musgrove - $500,000
#53 - Dwight Smith, Jr - $800,000
#57 - Kevin Comer - $1,650,000
#74 - Daniel Norris - $2,000,000
#78 - Jeremy Garbryszwski - $575,000
#108 - John Stilson - $500,000
#139 - Tom Robson - $325,000
#199 - Anthony DeSclafani - $235,000
#229 - Christian Lopes - $800,000
#259 - Mark Biggs - $600,000

(Figures per ProspectWatch)

That totals $8,975,000 -which is $145,000 more than that which is allocated for the top 10 rounds in 2012 by MLB - or a bit over $13,000 per signee on average. Impose this budget on last year's draft and at worst, you lose DeSclafani. 
It's also worth noting, at least Matt Dean (13th round) was signed for far more than 100k last year, reportedly $737,500,  most other bonuses are not readily available (in my quick search at least) but there's not one which was rumored to be that far over slot
So we lose Dean too, which would be a huge hit.
Anyway if one compares that total to last year then the Jays spent just over $2 mil last year on 25 players taken and signed after the 10th round and obviously the biggest chunk of that went to Dean. 

The point in that factoid is that teams obviously don't actually spend $100k a pick, typically, in the latter part of the draft. Besides Dean, and Justin Atkinson who's known to have gotten $100k, probably no one else did. But it's important to note that you can't "bank" money out of that $4 million to spend on the bonuses in the pool - the pool is a fixed number. However, if you did happen to have money left from the pool, you can use it to go over $100k on a lower round pick. (If I understand correctly what Callis said). So while there's a theoretical limit of almost $13 million, they won't get really all that close to it.

Now you know.