Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos said that there was "little mention" during MLB's CBA negotiations about "capping bonuses on international amateur free agents," according to Richard Griffin of the TORONTO STAR. Anthopoulos said, “I would say the $2.9 million (all figures U.S.) in international (bonus) caps surprised me. There hadn’t been any grumblings about anything like that. The focus seemed to be on the Rule 4 draft (of amateur players). The international side was very interesting and the fact that it could be going towards a worldwide draft. That’s been talked about forever. It certainly isn’t finalized or necessarily going to happen, but the cap on the international side most surprised me." Anthopoulos added, "For the clubs that have to build from the ground up, have to build from scratch, it’s going to be very hard to do, not being able to spend a little more in Latin America, not being able to spend a little more late in the draft, to not get extra draft picks. It's going to be a very slow process. It’s going to be hard to rebuild. It’s going to be really hard and really long.” Griffin writes, "It seems the amount of the bonuses that baseball will assign does not mean that you can overpay in one round and then quit signing when you run out of your allotment money. If you don’t sign a pick, then baseball subtracts that slotted amount from your total. No matter how you slice it, this amounts to a virtual hard cap." Anthopoulos: "For the sake of argument, if the first-round pick is a million dollars and let’s say you have a cap over 10 rounds of $5 million, if you don’t sign the pick in the first round, you don’t have $5 million. You lose it, so you can’t reallocate. Now, if your first-round pick is a million and you sign him for $800,000, you get 200K to spend. It’s the total of signed players. The players have to be signed or you don’t get that money" (TORONTO STAR, 12/2). MLB.com's Jonathan Mayo wrote under the header: "Signing-Bonus Constraints To Impact Draft: Time Will Tell If Teams Will Be Helped Or Hampered By New System." Mayo noted comparing "recent spending to how the signing bonus pools will be set up in the new system leads one to believe that perhaps these clubs won't be as bad off as some have thought" (MLB.com, 12/1).
