MLB announces full schedule for 2020 Draft and extends window to sign players to August 1st

It appears the final details for the 2020 MLB First Year Player Draft are coming together. After coming to a deal with the players union, Major League Baseball had fiddled with the idea of pushing the draft back to July but elected to conduct just a five-round draft and hold it on its originally scheduled date remotely. With the framework of the draft in place, the question became how MLB would schedule the selections.

J.J. Cooper of Baseball America is reporting that the draft will be held over two days, with the First and Competitive Balance A rounds being announced on the 10th and the rest of the picks on the 11th. The event will be televised on MLB Network and streamed to the MLB website. Teams will be prohibited from talking to non-drafted players, which I wonder how they will enforce, until 9:00am ET on June 14th. Teams can sign as many undrafted players as they want, but they can only receive a maximum bonus of $20K.

After the draft, teams will have until August 1st to sign their entire class. The original date was July 10th, but right now teams are in an environment where it’s more difficult to fly a player in and undergo a physical upon signing the contract. The logistics behind this potential problem will still need to ironed out.