We are still four months away from the 2025 MLB Draft, but a mock draft was unveiled at Baseball America on Monday, taking a stab at predicting the top 40 picks. That reminded me that the Dodgers this year will have their largest-ever bonus pool to spend on picks.
The main culprit for the larger pool was acquiring the Reds’ Competitive Balance Round A pick as part of the Gavin Lux trade on January 6.
Competitive Balance picks are derived from teams each year that either have the 10 smallest revenues or are in the 10 smallest markets. The group is split into two, with Round A directly after the first round and Round B directly after the second round. Competitive Balance picks are the only draft picks that can be traded.
The Dodgers’ would have had the 30th pick in the first round by virtue of winning the World Series. But because they exceeded the third competitive balance tax threshold (they blew past it, and the fourth threshold too), their first draft pick drops 10 spots. This also happened for the Dodgers in the 2022 and 2023 drafts as well.
They aren’t the only team to have their first pick drop by 10 spots. The Mets and Yankees were also big spenders, and have their first picks at 38th and 39th respectively, directly in front of the Dodgers. Carlos Collazo at Baseball America detailed the various tweaks to the draft order based on forfeited picks, compensatory selections, and more.
Here are the Dodgers’ draft picks for 2025, courtesy of MLB.com:
Dodgers 2025 draft picks
Round
Pick
Round
Pick
Comp A
40
Comp A
41
2
65
3
104
4
135
5
165
6
195
7
225
8
255
9
285
10
315
11
345
12
375
13
405
14
435
15
465
16
495
17
525
18
555
19
585
20
615
Pick No. 40 is the Dodgers’ first-round pick that was dropped 10 slots. No. 41 overall is the pick received from the Reds. The Dodgers also have a full slate of picks this year, with no forfeitures.
Blake Snell was the big-ticket free agent for the Dodgers this offseason, signing a five-year, $182 million contract in December. But because he already received a qualifying offer from the Padres after 2023, he was ineligible to receive a qualifying offer this time around. So the Dodgers did not have to forfeit any picks — it would have costed their second- and fifth-highest picks, as was the case after signing Freddie Freeman in 2022 and Shohei Ohtani in 2024.
A team’s draft bonus pool is determined from the recommended slot values of every pick through the first 10 rounds. Any signing bonus amount over $150,000 for picks after the 10th round also count against the pool.
That has effectively acted as a cap on teams’ spending since this current iteration of the draft was implemented in 2012. Spending up to five percent over the bonus pool results in only monetary penalties, an tax on the overage. But any spending more than five percent over the bonus pool begins to cost future draft picks. To date, no team has spent more than five percent over their pool.
We don’t have the exact slot values for the 2025 draft just yet, but a look at past values can give us an idea of this year. The jump from 2023 to 2024 for all the pick numbers of this year’s Dodgers was between 8.72 -8.74 percent, with the difference coming from rounding to the nearest $100.
We can apply that increase from 2024 to 2025 to get an idea of what the Dodgers will have to spend this year.
Dodgers 2025 draft bonus pool, roughly estimated
Round
Pick
2024 slot
2023 slot
24 over ’23 inc.
2025 estimate
Round
Pick
2024 slot
2023 slot
24 over ’23 inc.
2025 estimate
Comp A
40
$2,332,100
$2,144,700
8.74%
$2,535,875
Comp A
41
$2,278,000
$2,094,900
8.74%
$2,477,103
2
65
$1,287,600
$1,184,100
8.74%
$1,400,147
3
104
$703,400
$646,900
8.73%
$764,835
4
135
$520,000
$478,200
8.74%
$565,454
5
165
$388,700
$357,500
8.73%
$422,623
6
195
$302,700
$278,400
8.73%
$329,121
7
225
$238,900
$219,700
8.74%
$259,778
8
255
$202,000
$185,800
8.72%
$219,612
9
285
$187,100
$172,100
8.72%
$203,407
10
315
$178,800
$164,400
8.76%
$194,384
Totals
$8,619,300
$7,926,700
$9,372,339
One caveat here is that in 2023 the final pick of the 10th round was No. 314 overall, so the 315th pick did not have a slot value. But picks 311-314 that year all had the same slot value of $164,400, so I used that to determine the increase over 2023.
This would give the Dodgers roughly $9.37 million to spend in their draft pool this year, which would be a big upgrade over having the second-lowest draft pool in the majors in 2024, at $6.11 million. It’ll still likely be in the bottom half of team bonus pools, but better than usual for a Dodgers team that hasn’t picked higher than 20th overall since 2013.
To date, the Dodgers’ largest bonus pool came in 2023, when they didn’t sign any qualifying-offer free agents and even got two extra picks after the fourth round when their own qualifying-offer free agents — Trea Turner and Tyler Anderson — signed elsewhere. The Dodgers had a $7.27 million bonus pool in 2023.
They’ll have much more to spend on this year’s draft.