Pittsburgh Pirates Draft: 2019 Competitive Balance Order

The Pittsburgh Pirates offseason has gotten underway.  However, yesterday there was an announcement about the draft next year.

Major League Baseball installed two competitive balance rounds under the league’s new Competitive Balance Agreement. This is to benefit small market teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates, who rely heavily on homegrown players. This allows for smaller market teams to gain an extra high draft pick to bring in another quality prospect.

The Competitive Balance rounds are slotted picks after the first round and the second round of the draft.  These rounds are called Competitive Balance A and Competitive Balance B.  The league picked the picks via a lottery in years past, but under the most recent CBA, the league takes the 10 smallest revenue teams and their win percentage to determine who gets what picks.  The league did this two years ago, and the Bucs had a pick after the second round in 2017.  Then in 2018, the league simply flipped the two rounds moving all the Competitive Balance B picks to the A and vice-versa.

Obviously, the Pittsburgh Pirates being a rather small market and floating around .500 received a pick.  As mentioned they had one the last two years as well.  This year the Pittsburgh Pirates will have a pick in the Competitive Balance B round.  The Bucs will have the 73rd pick in the draft, which ends up being the third pick in that round.

However, the Pittsburgh Pirates actually have a pick in the Competitive Balance A round as well. The team will have the 37th overall pick.  This is because the team had the 36th pick in last year’s draft.  The team took high school pitcher Gunnar Hoglund with the pick. However, the team did not sign Hoglund who instead decided to attend Ole Miss. Due to that, the Pittsburgh Pirates get a compensation pick at one pick later in this year’s draft.

Here is a complete list of the Competitive Balance rounds by picks via MLB Pipeline:

Competitive Balance A

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34. Miami Marlins

35. Tampa Bay Rays

36. Cincinnati Reds

37. Pittsburgh Pirates*

38. Oakland A’s

39. Milwaukee Brewers

40. Minnesota Twins

Competitive Balance B

71. Kansas City Royals

72. Baltimore Orioles

73. Pittsburgh Pirates

74. San Diego Padres

75. Arizona Diamondbacks

76. Colorado Rockies

77. Cleveland Indians

78. St. Louis Cardinals

The Pittsburgh Pirates will also have the 18th pick in the first round along with the 57th overall pick, which is their second-round pick. So all in all, the Bucs will have four picks inside the top 73 which should allow them to add a lot of high-end talent after trading away some top prospects at least year’s deadline.  This should also set up the Neal Huntington and the Bucs with one of the highest draft bonus pools, which should allow them to get creative with their draft spending.

*The Pittsburgh Pirates have to sign a player at pick number 37 or else they will lose the pick altogether, the team is only granted one year of compensation when failing to sign a draft pick