Sunday is the big day.
For a lot of baseball players across the country, their dreams are going to come true. All the hours of hard work and sacrifice will finally pay off when they hear their names called in the 2022 MLB draft as the first round kicks off at 6 p.m. CT with the second round following later in the night.
LSU finished with the No. 1 recruiting class in 2022, and that is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that you have an incredible amount of talent coming to your team next season. The curse is that seven of the 10 LSU players on MLB Pipeline’s top 100 prospects list are prep prospects.
The players coming out of high school can choose to say no to the team that drafts them and come to LSU instead, but money talks. A lot of major league teams are willing to overpay for top prep talent.
Every draft pick in the first 10 rounds comes with an assigned value, with the total for a club’s selections equaling what it can spend in those rounds without incurring a penalty. If a player taken in the top 10 rounds doesn’t sign, his pick’s value gets subtracted from his team’s pool.
Clubs near the top of the draft often spend less than the assigned value for those choices and use the savings to offer more money to later selections. So, most teams will spend under value for guys that they are pretty sure will sign with them and use that money to pay more than the slot value to try and convince a prep player to sign instead of going to college.
For live MLB draft updates, stay tuned in to LSU Wire on Sunday. For now, here are the top 10 Tigers players and signees that should hear their names called this week.