Vahn Lackey Photo: Petre Thomas-Imagn Images

The 2026 MLB Draft begins tomorrow. Dreams will come true, and the course of baseball history will be altered not just by the talent of the players, but by the collective decisions of hundreds of hard-working people with teams and agencies who have been preparing for this since long before last year’s draft even began. Even though the current CBA negotiations and the owners’ proposal to maim the draft’s current format casts something of a shadow on this year’s event, it’s an exciting time for everyone, myself included. I not only get to learn about this class of players and share opinions about their baseball futures with our readers, I also get to highlight the strategies teams might use to maximize the talent they come away with. The bonus pool system, and the ways that teams, players, and their representatives navigate the “game” of the draft, is one of the things that separates baseball’s selection meeting from those of other sports. It rewards strategy, creativity and the cultivation of information that has nothing to do with hard baseball data. In this post, I’ll talk about the makeup and quality of this year’s class, take you through the pockets of players that pose difficult questions for clubs, and discuss a couple potential draft strategies, as well as which teams might best be able to execute them.

You’ll find the scouting reports and tool grades of 146 players over on The Board. Of that group, the 75 with a 40+ FV or above grade have an ordinal ranking, with the balance grouped by demographic. Brendan and I may still pepper that space with additional players between now and the draft, but they’ll be guys who fall lower on the list. The hard-ranked players are the ones who we’re most excited about.

Let’s Take the Temperature of the Talent

The industry generally sees this as a bit of a down draft. I agree with that sentiment at the very top, where this class lacks an obviously elite talent and instead has a three-player tier of guys who you’d be thrilled to take with picks three to five in a typical draft, but not necessarily first overall.

There’s also a weird vacuum in the middle of the first round that’s the result of this being an inordinately risky group, mostly due to injuries. It’s one thing to be excited about Texas A&M second baseman Chris Hacopian (the data darling college hitter of this year’s class who dealt with back issues this season) or Arizona State lefty Cole Carlon (who touches 100 and has the best slider in the entire draft, but also was removed from a late-season start after his velo dipped) from our perspective as outside observers, but it’s another matter entirely to use a top 15 pick on (and give $5 million to) someone with a scary injury history or medical report. There are several players, mostly college pitchers, who would ordinarily have the talent to come off the board in the pick 10-20 range of most drafts, but injuries might cause them to slide later in the round.

Still, this isn’t exclusively a health-related issue. There are some incredibly talented and accomplished players whose profiles have one ominous detail that, depending on the team or scout, could reasonably make the drafter apprehensive about them. In this draft in particular there are lots of toolsy prospects who might not be able to hit big league pitching consistently enough to be any good. High school shortstop Jacob Lombard is an unbelievable athlete for his size and might be a plus defender at short with plus-plus power at maturity. He also had a 61% contact rate against decent-to-good high school pitchers on the showcase circuit, a rate lower than any big leaguer. This dynamic also applies to Alabama shortstop Justin Lebron (an elite defender with exciting power projection) and several of the college catchers, including Golden Spikes winner Daniel Jackson from Georgia, who slugged .800 this year.

There’s always a portion of the draft where teams get sufficiently nervous about these sorts of players that they run to safe-feeling college hitters who make a lot of contact, usually in big conferences. This tends to happen in the mid-to-late first round. You draft Sal Frelick, or Nico Hoerner, or Justin Foscue, or Trevor Larnach, or Logan Warmoth (they don’t always work out) and feel at least fine about it. This year, that might start happening inside the top 10. There aren’t enough healthy and exciting college pitchers, or super talented high school players, to push the run on this type of college hitter down toward the middle of the first round. Stable hitters like Hacopian, 5-foot-9 Georgia Tech outfielder Drew Burress, LSU center fielder Derek Curiel and Louisville outfielder Zion Rose are the candidates to fill the vacuum.

The Class Has Impressive Depth

Every year it feels like there are more high school pitchers with light-you-up stuff. We aren’t all that far removed from Tyler Kolek and Riley Pint going in the top couple of picks. Now there are high school righties throwing 100 who won’t even go in the first round. Some of the scouting industry’s adjustment to this demographic comes from the failures of past selections. It’s a risky contingent playing Russian Roulette with their ligaments every week for three or four years between when they’re drafted and when they reach the big leagues. But part of why high school pitchers are being “de-valued” at the very top of the draft is because the talent pool is suddenly flooded with good ones. The understanding and use of science in training, nutrition, biomechanics, and pitch design has flowed from the highest levels of baseball all the way down to whichever Zoomer is curious and motivated enough to apply it to himself. As a result, there are 16 high school pitchers in this draft to whom I’d be tempted to give $2 million or more to. But there are only so many picks, and there are about 75 players in this draft, regardless of position or age, to whom that applies, while there are only about 50 draft slots with bonus amounts of $2 million or more. There might be a few teams that are in a position to take advantage of that talent overage.

Which Teams Have the Power?

Each individual draft pick slot has an assigned bonus amount that contributes to the total pool a team is allowed to spend. Teams with early selections and/or a copious number of picks have the biggest bonus pools, and usually leave the weekend with the most talent. Here are the teams with more than $14 million to spend this year, as well as their total pool amounts:

• Pirates: $19,130,700
• Rays: $19,009,300
• White Sox: $17,592,100
• Giants: $17,350,600
• Twins: $16,929,600
• Cardinals: $16,612,300
• Royals: $15,954,000
• Braves: $15,870,800
• Rockies: $15,557,600

The Braves, Giants, Royals and Cardinals are arguably in the most interesting position of this group because their second picks (26th, 29th, 30th, and 32nd overall, respectively) come before the second picks of the teams ahead of them on this bonus pool leaderboard. If there is an expensive player or two who the Pirates, Rays, White Sox or Twins are hoping to float to their second pick, that quartet above (depending on what they did with their first selections) is in position to spoil the fun and offer that player enough to sign. The Pirates, who have baseball’s best farm system before accounting for prospect graduations, have five picks in the first three rounds and the biggest bonus pool.

The Impact of NIL Money

A growing dynamic affecting the signability of players is the money college programs are able to offer them. This is less of an issue for the top-of-the-class talents, and more a source of tension for established college players in rounds 6-10. There are some players who are more impactful in the college game than they are valued in pro ball, mostly the big, positionless mashers and the pitchers who are rotation staples in college but have fringe stuff compared to big leaguers. These are the sorts of players who schools are offering $500,000 in NIL money to, while the slot value of picks after the fifth round dips below that figure. Though there are definitely good players drafted after the fifth round every year, you could argue this issue mostly impacts the quality of org guys rather than those who we’d consider to be actual prospects. But even if that’s true, it’s contributing to the degradation of the overall level of play in the minors.

How Will Teams Under New Leadership Behave?

The thought processes of successful teams tend to permeate the rest of the league over time as executives a level or two below the GM/POBO are hired to run other orgs. There are several teams that have changed leadership during the last couple of years, and those new folks might bring their old team’s strategy to the draft room. It sometimes takes a couple of years to suss out whether that’s happened, and if so, what those tendencies are. Sometimes teams copy the approach of others without there being connective tissue like this; they just see the strategy being used and decide it’s a good idea to try it themselves. For example, for the last several years, the Brewers have employed a strategy where they save bonus space early on so they can keep taking mid-six-figure type players at a point late in the draft when the rest of the league is mostly drafting organizational filler. But part of their ability to continue to do so successfully might depend on them being the only ones with this approach. I’m curious if anyone else will start to try this since the Brewers are a team that’s generally very highly regarded.