San Diego Padres 2024 Draft Picks Signing Tracker: Bonuses, Deadline

The San Diego Padres have dealt away a number of prospects in recent years in the trades for Juan Soto, Dylan Cease, and Luis Arráez, among others. As a result, their farm system has seen better days, especially now that Jackson Merrill and Adam Mazur have been promoted to the big leagues.

Fortunately, the 2024 MLB Draft arrived just in time to allow the Padres to add some prospect reinforcements.

Unlike a lot of teams in the modern game of baseball, the Padres have been completely unafraid to gamble on high school talent in the first round of the draft and have been more successful with that demographic than almost any other organization. That trend continued in the 2024 draft as the Padres picked prep arm Kash Mayfield with the 25th overall selection and went heavy on high school talent in the following four rounds. That puts a lot of pressure on the Padres to get these kids signed, so here is a look at what San Diego is working with when it comes to securing its draft class.

Which San Diego Padres 2024 draft picks have signed and for how much?

Unlike some sports where a given pick gets paid a set amount, MLB has a draft bonus pool system that is a bit more flexible. Basically, the way it works is that all of a given team's picks for rounds 1-10 have a pre-determined slot value assigned to them. You add up all of those "slots" to get that team's bonus pool, which, for the Padres, means that they have $9,360,500 in bonus pool money to play with. They can spread out that money however they want amongst their picks from rounds 1-10 as well as use it to fund bonuses beyond $150,000 given to any players picked in rounds 11-20.

In the Padres' case, it is likely that we will see a few overslot signing bonuses that will frontload their draft class with Mayfield, Boston Bateman, Cobb Hightower, and Kale Fountain all being talented high school players with a lot of leverage in negotiations (since they could just go to college instead). Still, it is likely that general agreements were already in place and they will sign, because the cost to the team if a player doesn't sign a slot pick is too high to leave to chance.

The Padres can use up to 5% over their bonus pool without any issues, but they won't go any more than that as the penalties are severe. The draft pick signing deadline this year is August 1, 2024, so it won't be long before we starting getting news of the Padres' picks signing and for how much. Below is San Diego's 2024 draft class as well as their signing status (this will be updated as information becomes available).

*Updated 7/24*

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