An insider’s view of the MLB draft, or, why a player might sign for $500.

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Last week, the Rays’ 10th Round pick, Texas Tech pitcher Trendan Parish, signed for $500. For his next 6 pro seasons, Mr. Parish will be under the team’s control, earning literal poverty wages (less than $16,000 per year) unless he manages to turn himself into a prospect and start jumping levels.

Part of me hates this situation — I am a big believer in paying minor leaguers more money and entry level employees of all industries more money. But another part of me sees this a morally neutral exchange.

Parish, an unlikely draft pick based on his college performance, gets to start his pro career, gets to work in a coveted industry that for the most part veers closer towards meritocracy than any other industry. He gets to boast, forever, that he was a 10th Round pick, an honor no one can take away from him. He’s doing better than many other college seniors of his graduating class.

But his inglorious entry into the professional ranks, whether moral or amoral, does highlight part of the meta game of the MLB Draft — a game that was very opaque to me, and to most people — until I had a chance to watch it up close.

In 2018, I had the unparalleled experience of working in the Miami Marlins draft war room. It was Derek Jeter’s first draft with the team, and he wanted as many scouts and analysts as possible in the room, collaborating and parsing through the then-40 rounds of baseball talent. There were some 15 whiteboards covered in magnets with names of hopeful baseball players and wild hunches and injury gambles.

It was an electric atmosphere, and we watched each pick with the focus of a chess player creeping a pawn across the board, hoping to reach the other side, hoping for That Guy to fall to us. (For me that year, it was this light-hitting outfielder who popped in our draft model, a guy out of Oregon State named Steven Kwan, but he went about 10 rounds too early for us analysts to start hammering a table for him.)

I am sad to admit it was a historically bad draft for us that year. Our combined brain powers — which, if I was being honest, was definitely undervaluing the excellent draft model built by former DRaysBay and Rays Colored Glasses writer Robbie Knopf — managed to draft and sign only 2 meaningful Major League contributors that year, a marginal starting catcher (and nice guy), Nick Fortes, and a solid lefty reliever (and talkative, friendly guy), Alex Vesia. But the experience was nonetheless illuminating for me. I saw for the first time the game within the game, the meta challenge of the MLB Draft.

I think it is easy to forget, in a sport where team owners make billions and top tier players make millions, that most pro baseball players are barely eking out a living. For the majority, the Rule 4 Draft in July is going to be the biggest and most meaningful disbursement of money they will ever see in their baseball lives.

Zach Wolf, a short right-handed pitcher we drafted in the 18th round, signed for $150,000 and never made it past Double A before retiring. Wolf’s fastball shape was unique, so he was a bit of a darling in our Analytics Department, but given his pedigree and height (at 5-foot-9, he would have been in the first percentile among MLB pitcher heights), it was always a long shot he’d make the majors. In his 3 minor league seasons, he amassed less than $90K in salary (the Double-A minimum in 2025 is $30K prorated annually, and he only spent 13 games at that level), meaning he almost certainly made twice as much money on Draft Day than he did the rest of his professional playing career.

Which takes us back to Trendan Parish, 10th Round pick for the Tampa Bay Rays in the 2025 Draft. The 10th round is a wild round. It is the MOST important round for the meta game of the MLB Draft. It is the final round where the Bonus Pool rules apply, so if a team has committed a bunch of money to a higher up pick, the 10th round is their last chance to claw back that money.

My main role on Draft Day for the Marlins from 2018 through 2024 was to be one of the quality assurance number crunchers for the Bonus Pool. We wanted to be 100% certain we had enough Pool money to sign a given player, and 100% certain we knew how much money we would have to get back in the later rounds.

Consider this table for the Rays’ 2025 Draft bonuses in the first 10 rounds:

It is typical for teams to identify several players who would otherwise be Round 20 or Minor League Free Agent types and take them in Rounds 8 through 10 in order to shave money for those higher picks like Cooper Flemming and Dean Moss. Every year with the Marlins, we played the game as dangerously as possible, spending all of our pool in order to maximize our odds of getting a good prospect (with almost zero success to speak of, quite embarrassingly).

But in order to do so, the amateur scouts have to be certain they know how much a player is willing to sign for. They ask seniors if they’ve got a job lined up, juniors how classes are going, get a sense if the kid is so sick of school or home life that they are eager to jump into pro ball no matter what. In the days leading up to the draft, they might even directly ask the player (or their informal representation) whether they would be willing to be one of these Late Ten picks, a sacrificial lamb for more interesting prospects higher up.

This may very well have been the case for Trendan Parish. A cursory look at this college stats do not scream MLB Draft pick — he held a career 6.26 ERA in a Big 12 division with a 5.00ish ERA average, while striking out fewer batters than average. Why choose him at all? I would guess that Parish has a pitch or two that are interesting, maybe a high-spin-rate slider or a funky release point, that they hope their development system can cultivate. It sounds like he finished the season strong, possibly unlocking something late in the years the Rays might hope is sustainable. But odds are, since no other team with equally competent development systems took a flyer on him, any unique things he showed in college had to be very muted.

Whatever the prospects are for Parish, it is undeniable that a $500 signing bonus is an extremely small bonus. The green rounded 0% in that table is jarring. Considering the Rays will have control over Parish for the next 6 years of his pro career, it represents a very low bonus. An almost insultingly low bonus, doubly so when considering— as we see above — the Rays did not end up needing a full $818,700 of their pool. The franchise certainly pinches pennies, but historically the Rule 4 draft (and international amateur free agency) are not areas where they do so. The return on investment is so disproportionate in those areas that the club as always spent lavishly on draft picks and Dominican and Venezuelan amateurs.

But as was my annual draft job with the Marlins, the Rays’ bonus calculations on Draft Day are all provisional. A player’s rep might say on Draft Day they will “absolutely sign, no matter what” and then refuse the first 3 or 4 offers the team throws their way. It’s a hallmark of good negotiation.

No one had better negotiation ability than my friend, your friend Kameron Misner, whom we drafted in 2019. Misner’s reps waited for all the other picks to sign, then calculated the remaining Draft Pool for the Marlins, and said, “Coincidentally, that’s exactly my fee.”

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Kameron Misner initially signed with the Miami Marlins, but was careful to wait until the last minute in order to soak up the remaining budget pool.

My guess is the Rays were swift enough to prevent any picks from crunching those numbers, or perhaps the player they expected to go way over slot was apparently sick of school and signed unexpectedly cheap. Possibly, they had lined up these Late 10 guys for a big bonus guy that didn’t fall to them. We cannot say for certain what happened.

That budget surplus doesn’t mean any more money for Trendan Parish, though, who will certainly need an offseason job and post-baseball plan ASAP. The failure of higher-up players to maximize their potential earnings is no fault of the college seniors drafted below them, and it’s also no benefit to them.

I had the pleasure of talking extensively one hot South Florida afternoon with left-handed pitcher Andrew Miller. Not the famous one. The 40th Round pick for the 2018 Marlins draft. That Andrew Miller impressively signed for $150,000, despite being the team’s final pick that year. And judging by my conversation with Miller, there was no way he was staying one more minute in college. He experienced coaching turnover, unpredictable playing time, and usage abuse that likely led to the Tommy John surgery that caused him to be a 40th Round pick. But since the club did not know that — even though they took him with the last pick and had to have known there wasn’t much competition for him — he was able to at least squeeze some money out of this industry that offers so very little of it at these lowest levels.

Miller’s signing bonus was likely ten times what he earned as a player over the following 2 seasons of his brief pro career, but Trendan Parish is going to have trouble beating minimum wage over his next few years in the sport. According to Baseball America, he will be making $700 per week with $31 per diem (with 2 meals covered per day, plus his housing). But players don’t get paid during the offseason, and the 12-week FCL season is already underway.

There is no major windfall on the horizon for Parish, no game-changing bonus for good performance. If Parish goes nuts, pitches well beyond his pedigree, he might make it to Double A by the end of next year (relievers can move fast in a typical system, though the Rays tend to have more internal competition than most). At Double A, he would earn around $1000 per week. The season is longer above the Rookie level, so that would certainly help, but at 23 to 24 weeks, plus Spring Training, Parish will likely still be struggling to pay for just housing in the offseason — though this is nothing new in the larger history of minor league players. Living with parents or family in the offseason is effectively common practice, an abusive initiation rite, in the history of the sport.

Teams do have the prerogative to pay minor leaguers whatever they decide, so long as they are above the league minimums. But the odds are against either Parish earning massive pay bumps or the Rays being quick to give them.

Either way, I’ll be rooting for him. He played the role of a pawn in a bigger game, but sometimes pawns turn into royalty. It’s just not very easy to get to the far side of the board.

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