Major League Rule 5 draft expected to take place after lockout
MLB's decades-old December tradition was frozen along with all other roster transactions once the league locked out players on Dec. 1, 2021, with the draft pushed to whenever a new labor deal is signed.
The major league phase of Major League Baseball's Rule 5 draft, normally held in early December, was postponed indefinitely as part of the leaguewide transaction freeze that began when MLB locked out players on December 1, 2021, following the expiration of the prior collective bargaining agreement, according to MLB Trade Rumors.
'The draft is on track to happen at some point,' JJ Cooper of Baseball America said, according to MLB Trade Rumors' report, adding that it would be 'a continuation of a more than century-old trend, as the Rule 5 has taken place each offseason since 1920.' The outlet reported the draft was expected to take place shortly after the next CBA was signed, rather than on a fixed date.
The minor league phase of the draft, which does not involve players on 40-man rosters and so was not affected by the lockout's transaction freeze, was still scheduled to proceed on December 8, 2021 -- the day after this report -- per MLB Trade Rumors.
What the Rule 5 draft does
The Rule 5 draft exists to give players buried on their organization's depth chart a path to the major leagues elsewhere. Players with four or five years of professional experience, depending on the age at which they signed, must either be added to their club's 40-man roster or be exposed in the draft, according to MLB Trade Rumors' explanation of the mechanism. A player selected in the major league phase must then remain on the selecting team's active roster or major league injured list for the entire following season, or be offered back to his original organization.
What was still unresolved
At the time of this report, no new collective bargaining agreement had been reached, so no firm date existed for the rescheduled draft. A Rule 5 selection costs a drafting team $100,000 per player, and any change to that structure or to the draft's timing required approval from the players' union since the mechanism is collectively bargained.
Uncertainty deepened as the lockout dragged on
The postponement described in this report was an early sign of a standoff that grew more serious as the lockout continued. By early March 2022, ESPN reported that multiple teams had separately asked MLB about canceling that year's major league Rule 5 draft outright, rather than simply continuing to postpone it -- a request tied to teams' discomfort with scouting during the freeze. Five general managers told ESPN that canceling the draft entirely would let clubs lift restrictions they had placed on their own scouts, restrictions adopted because teams feared that if scouts kept gathering fresh information on rival prospects' improvement during the lockout, that intelligence could be used against them once a draft was held. ESPN reported that 16 organizations had gone so far as to bar opposing scouts from their minor league complexes entirely, with only five teams -- the Reds, Brewers, A's, Rays and Mariners -- permitting reciprocal scouting access during that period.
That later reporting showed the major league phase of the draft ultimately did not happen at all that offseason -- the first time since 1920 -- before a Rule 5 draft resumed the following year.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by MLB Trade Rumors, with later context from ESPN's reporting on the lockout's effect on scouting. It restores a story originally published on this site in December 2021; figures are as reported at the time.