The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox.Good morning! Let’s talk about high school. Coming up:
⭐ Haaland-Kane clash
MLB Draft: The league’s bleak proposal for the futureMajor League Baseball’s draft begins today at 1:30 p.m. ET on NBC. (Our live blog will be here.) If commissioner Rob Manfred gets his way, it’ll be the last draft before the rules begin to change, and what comes next will be worse.MLB and its player union continue to swap proposals ahead of a near-certain lockout this winter. The parties’ early proposals are largely performative and may not resemble the collective bargaining agreement they reach. But one of the league’s proposals is such a stark departure from history that it stopped me in my tracks — a total overhaul of the way teams acquire amateur talent. At the risk of slightly oversimplifying, the league wants to do three things:
Institute an international draft, which would replace the current amateur signing system for players from outside Puerto Rico, the rest of the United States and Canada.
Shorten the domestic draft from 20 rounds to 12 and institute hard bonus slots in both this and the international draft.
