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Bonus rule

Former Major League Baseball contractual rule

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 22, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

The bonus rule was a contractual rule affecting major league baseball intermittently between 1947 and 1964, meant to prevent teams from assigning certain players to farm teams. The rule stipulated that when a major-league team signed a player to a contract with a signing bonus above a certain threshold, the team was required to keep that player on their active roster. Any team that failed to comply with the rule lost the rights to that player's contract, and the player was then exposed to the waiver wire.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Bonus rule” as former Major League Baseball contractual rule. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bonus, rule and Former.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1947, 1964—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Bonus, rule and Former providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Bonus rule”, the useful work is to connect “former Major League Baseball contractual rule” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1947 and 1964.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Bonus rule” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.