The days leading up to and immediately following the 20 rounds of the Major League Baseball draft are some of the most intense and stressful in the baseball calendar. The games that big-league teams are playing around then have a familiar bleary early-summer insignificance, but their front offices are sifting through data and scouting reports before drafting a combined 600 players to try and set the course for the future of the franchise. The 2024 draft introduced a new element of stress into this equation, with new organizational rules limiting how many players a team can have in their system. Per these rules, for every player drafted and signed, another must be cut. “You have to ask yourself a question as you’re going through a 20-round draft,” one team employee told me. “Who is this guy that I’m drafting replacing in our organization? You have to have around 20 guys that you’re willing to let go of.” When Major League Baseball and the Minor League Baseball Players Association ratified their bargaining agreement prior to the 2023 season, the league agreed to improve living conditions for minor leaguers, offering a higher quality of food, giving them the rights to their name, image, and likeness, promising not to cut any more minor league teams for the duration of the agreement, and paying out dramatic increases in annual salary. The league agreed to all that under one condition: the ability to cap a team's domestic rosters, first at 180 players in 2023 and then at 165 for 2024 and beyond. 

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