Atlanta Braves 2023 Draft Pick Signing Tracker

It is that time of the year again. Three days of drafting have come and gone, and the Atlanta Braves now turn their attention towards signing their draft picks. Atlanta led off the 2023 MLB Draft by taking Hurston Waldrep in the first round, a surprising tumbler who will take a significant portion of their total bonus pool. Another bigger bonus player from day one will be compensation round pick Cade Kuehler, who was taken with the pick the Braves got in exchange for Dansby Swanson leaving to Chicago. The Braves will also need to sign fourth round pick Garrett Baumann and fifth round pick Isaiah Drake away from their Division 1 college commitments. If you want to know more about these players I have them linked and you can also check out the MLB Draft category of the site for even more. Here is our full draft recap.

And for the mobile viewers, this year I have a simple tracker just for signed/unsigned

The Braves carry a full bonus pool this year of $8,341,700 but will be exceeding that total with near certainty. The most important number to know for the signing bonuses is the 5% overage, noted in the table, which is the point at which the Braves will not exceed. Any money spent between 100% and 105% will be subject to a 75% luxury tax against those bonus numbers, but above 5% and the Braves would then be sacrificing a future first round draft pick which is not worth the benefit of signing players to them. Any player from the first ten rounds who does not sign will have their slot value removed from the total bonus pool, thus teams typically have all of those picks lined up to sign prior to even drafting them. The second important rule is the non-pool picks from rounds 11 through 20. Each of these picks are given a maximum unpenalized bonus allotment of $150,000. Any total exceeding this amount will count against the bonus pool, but numbers below this won’t save the team anything to their bonus pool.

Another point you may notice is that a lot of the numbers will say something like “$3,497,500”. Each pick comes with a $2,500 contigency bonus, and while some teams will give this to the players others like the Braves will deduct it from the bonus to save some money in the pool. The final rule that comes into play specifically for the second round pick of Drue Hackenberg is the minimum signing bonus. Players who attend the draft combine and submit to a pre-draft medical evaluation (which Hackenberg did) must be given a minimum of 75% of their slot value. In Hackenberg’s case the slot for his individual pick is $1.369,300, so he must at minimum be given $1,026,975, and this is an important note as Hackenberg is expected to sign at below his slot value.

Another important rule is the case of an unsigned pick in the first three rounds. Should a player in one of these rounds not sign the drafting team loses the rights to said player and the bonus pool allotment, but as compensation receives a draft pick in the subsequent draft. For picks in the top two rounds they receive a pick that is one slot lower. The Braves did not sign Carter Stewart with the 8th overall pick in 2018, and thus they were given the 9th overall pick in 2019. Should a third round pick not sign, the team receives a compensation pick after the end of the third round. This rarely occurs, and is only given if the drafting team offers at least 40% of the slot value to the draftee, unless the player is a top 50 pitcher who declined to submit a pre-draft MRI.

Major signing updates from Carlos Collazo:

The last of the day one dominos has fallen, and at a much steeper cost than expected.