The draft and international budgets are largely unknown to us lowly fans, and many of us ask why the Yankees don’t just blow everyone out of the water and sign every decent player around. It doesn’t work like that of course, since one team’s decent player is another team’s can’t miss superstar and another team’s non-prospect. And besides, there’s point of diminishing returns even with prospects.
Baseball America provided a list of each team’s draft spending from 2008 through 2010 last summer, and more recently published a list of each club’s spending on the international market. When we add the two together, we see that the Yankees spent a total of $11.92M on amateur players last year, the seventh most in baseball. The Pirates ($16.9M) and Blue Jays ($15.77M) were far and away the biggest spenders, followed by the Nationals ($12.78M), Astros ($12.41M), Red Sox ($12.3M), and Rangers ($12.06M). The Indians, Mariners, and Orioles were the only other clubs to spend eight-figures on amateurs, and the league average was just over $9M. They’re not blowing everyone out of the water, but the Yankees were far from cheap when it came to amateur talent in 2010.
If you want to see a chart with all this info broken down and tallied up, click here. All told, the 30 clubs combined to spend just north of $270M on amateur players last season.
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