Tigers sign 4th round draft pick Ryan Kreidler to full slot bonus

Update: The Tigers have signed three more top-10 picks: Ryan Kreidler, Bryant Packard, and Zack Hess. All three players signed for full slot value, and all will report to the Gulf Coast League when play begins on Monday, June 24.

The Detroit Tigers signed sixth round pick Cooper Johnson to a full-slot bonus on Monday evening, according to MLB.com’s Jim Callis. Johnson, a catcher from Ole Miss, is regarded as one of the top defenders in the draft. He projects as a below-average hitter, but has some raw power the Tigers are hoping he taps into at the professional level.

Johnson is the fifth Tigers draft pick in the top 10 rounds to sign his professional contract. Eighth rounder Jack Kenley, a shortstop from Arkansas, just concluded his season on Monday, while the others were eliminated in NCAA tournament play. The Tigers still have two draft picks remaining in the College World Series: 11th round pick John McMillon and 33rd rounder Jimmy Kerr.

How do these contract bonuses work anyway?

The Tigers selected 40 players in the 2019 amateur player draft on June 3. Their draft haul includes 23 position players and 17 pitchers. Thirty eight of the 40 are college players, while just two were selected out of high school. The Tigers have a total slot allotment of $10,402,500 for the first ten rounds. Although they selected fifth in each round, Detroit had the ninth-largest bonus pool because they did not receive any compensation picks, which would come with extra slot money to spend. Nor did the Tigers receive a competitive balance selection, or acquire any of those extra picks in trades. The Tigers spent $14,784,100 for their entire draft bonus budget in 2018, the highest total in Major League Baseball.

The allotment represents the amount that the club can spend on signing bonuses for the top 10 draft picks. Each slot comes with an individual value, but teams are not restricted to that particular value for each pick, as long as the total bonuses paid to their top 10 selections does not exceed the total allotment.

If a club fails to sign a player selected in the first 10 rounds, including supplemental draft picks, the club loses the value of that slot. They will then receive an extra selection next year, just one slot lower than their unsigned player’s slot.

There is no bonus value assigned to draft slots after the 10th round, but if a club pays a signing bonus of more than $125,000 to a player selected in the 11th round or later, or to a player eligible for selection who was not drafted, the overage is counted against their allotment.

If a club exceeds its total bonus allotment, a tax will be assessed, and future draft picks could be forfeited, depending on how much the club exceeded its bonus pool. A club can go up to five percent above their allotment and pay only a financial penalty on the overage. The penalties for going more than five percent over include loss of future draft picks, and are severe enough that no team has paid any penalties other than the monetary tax.

Teams have until July 12 to sign these players, or they will be ineligible to sign and will be eligible for the 2020 amateur player draft.

We will keep track of which players have signed, how much their signing bonuses are, and how those bonuses compare with the bonus slot allotments that the Tigers can spend without paying any penalties.