Jeff Passan, who normally gets things right before reporting, has the details here in twitter form. To very briefly summarize, since an article outlining everything hasn’t been thrown up there yet, teams that go over the slot recommendations by more than 5% will face a tax, and if they go over by more than 10% they lose draft picks. The ramifications here are:

* Teams will no longer be able to pay big bonuses to players that slip in the draft. The Phillies never did this in the first round, but they have selectively done this in the middle-later rounds. This will impact pretty much everyone.
* The talent pool could potentially get gutted, especially in the prep ranks. A high school player with a full scholarship to a top notch program (like Vanderbilt, UVA, Stanford, etc) will now seemingly be unsignable outside of the top 5 picks, and even those guys might be unsignable.
* This will skew the draft heavily toward college talent.

I will have a more detailed writeup on these items when we start gearing up for the 2012 draft. Part of me is pissed, because this is going to really reduce the amount of draftable talent every year. Another part of me thinks this might give the Phillies a bigger advantage, because they have shown the superiority in their scouting abilities, consistently plucking up good players outside of the first 1-2 rounds, which is where most teams are spending huge sums of money.

These rules are going to really impact the freespending teams like Boston, the Yankees, Detroit, Kansas City (still shocking to write) and Toronto, among others, who have been a lot more aggressive in recent years. Now signability for slot becomes the single biggest factor when evaluating talent. What this essentially does is level the playing field financially, but I think its also going to greatly reduce the amount of elite talent available on a year to year basis (especially the next 3 years) and also drastically improve the quality of college baseball talent.

For now, discuss.