Manfred: MLB Open To Discussing Draft Pick Trades In The Future

It doesn’t mean pick swaps will happen any time soon, but in his yearly All-Star week Q&A with the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA), MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said there is some receptivity to allowing teams to trade draft picks.

Currently teams can only trade competitive balance picks, which are a small number of picks that occur after the first and second rounds of the MLB Draft. The league prohibits them from trading all other picks. That prohibition stretches back to the beginning of the draft in 1965.

“The most important point is obviously that’s a topic that has to be bargained collectively with the MLBPA,” Manfred said.

The league can’t unilaterally change the structure of the draft because it’s part of MLB’s collective bargaining agreement with MLB players. Until now, MLB has taken the position that the risk of teams making misguided moves has outweighed the potential benefits of giving teams additional trade assets and draft flexibility.

“The positions the clubs have taken over time in terms of what they want us to do at the table has been a product of a balance between flexibility in terms of utilizing the resources available to you on the one hand and paternalism on the other—that is I’m going to prevent you from doing acts because I think it would be stupid,” Manfred said.

Manfred then said that while that has been a long-time concern, he isn’t particularly worried that a poorly run club would squander draft picks in misguided trades.

“I don’t think we have that many stupid clubs. We’ll see how it shakes out. We will go through our (collective) bargaining prep,” Manfred said. “The clubs are really sophisticated now. I do think that there’s a really good argument for allowing them to decide how to use their resources.”

The current MLB-MLBPA collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2026 season. It is unlikely that anything would be done before that, which means the earliest such a change would be in place is for the 2027 MLB Draft. And that would only be if both sides agreed to that change.