Rule 5 draft
Major League Baseball draft of professional non-roster players
The Rule 5 draft is a Major League Baseball (MLB) player draft that occurs each year in December, at the annual Winter Meeting of general managers. The Rule 5 draft aims to prevent teams from stockpiling too many young players on their minor league affiliate teams when other organizations would be willing to have them play in the major leagues. The Rule 5 draft is named for its place in The Official Professional Baseball Rules Book. The Rule 4 draft—more widely known as the "first-year player draft", "amateur draft", or simply the "MLB draft"—is a distinctly different process by which teams select high school and college players, and takes place annually in July.
The Rule 5 draft has happened every year since 1920. The 2021 MLB lockout led to the postponement of the major league phase of the Rule 5 draft, but the minor league phase proceeded as scheduled.
History
MLB player transactions are governed by The Official Professional Baseball Rules Book, within which, Rule 5 governs the "Annual Selection of Players".
The first version of what would become known as the Rule 5 draft began in 1892. Picks were originally chosen from independent minor league teams before the farm system developed, with teams compensated financially based on 'level' of the minor league the team was in.
Prior to its current incarnation, from 1959 until the creation of the annual amateur Rule 4 draft in 1965, top first-year prospects of teams were exposed to the Rule 5 draft.
“Rule 5 draft” enters the record as major League Baseball draft of professional non-roster players. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rule, draft and Major can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rule 5 draft” 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.