The January 15 (or July 2 for all you purists) era of international amateur signings may be coming to an end. With the new collective bargaining agreement might come a newly minted international draft. On Wednesday, MLB continued its push to upend the current international ecosystem.
Major League Baseball laid out its vision for an International Draft to league executives Wednesday at the GM Meetings, presenting a 12-round, hard-slotted system that would raise the signing age by a year and shut down the current market with no transition period. It is the most detailed look yet at how the league wants to remake international talent acquisition, and the timeline it presented is aggressive: the current signing period would close on December 15, 2026, and the first International Draft would follow in late 2027 or early 2028.
In between sits what MLB is calling a "Dead Period."
The Structure
The proposed …