MLB Draft Day: the renewed debate surrounding the #1 Overall Pick
70 home runs through the end of May and a recent overtime finish to securing a series win in the Crosstown rivalry. If you guessed the Cubs, it would be an honest effort but a grave mistake. Competitive baseball is back on the South Side, as the upstart White Sox have placed the league on watch during the first couple months of this nascent MLB season. It’s their best start to a season since 2021 (26-26 through 52 games). While all the noise has brought added interest into the White Sox’ current assortment players, a very critical personnel question faces this organization in the near future. As a consequence of several hapless seasons, the franchise has lucked out in securing the #1 overall pick in the upcoming 2026 MLB draft, slated to take place July 11th - 13th.
Early signals seemed to indicate that UCLA junior and stud shortstop Roch Cholowsky would be the forgone conclusion to kick off the draft. After all, leading the #1 team in College Baseball in nearly every major offensive and defensive statistic is surely no easy feat. Cholowsky has been on the radar of MLB scouts since his near draft entry in 2023 and his decision to forgo it has clearly reaped many benefits given his successes in college baseball. However rumors in recent weeks have brought forward a debate, as some analysts have asserted that the South Side sluggers could benefit from taking a chance on Grady Emerson, an 18-year-old shortstop from Fort Worth, Texas — a stud in his own right. The characterization of a leap of faith is perhaps not wholly appropriate given most mock drafts have Emerson right behind Cholowsky. Until very recently, however, the gap between the two has been quite wide.
In my eyes, the choice seems obvious. Take the win-now guy, Roch.
This past May, Keith Law of the Athletic predicted that the Sox will ride with Emerson. In fact, his words seem to indicate that this is not necessarily his prescription but actually what the organization appears to be marketing as their preference. Jumping off this piece, Michael McDermott penned a pretty interesting argument on why Emerson is fiscally a superior option to Roch. His rational is predicated on a fascinating quirk of the MLB draft: signing bonus quotas.
Signing bonus quotas, or slot values, have been in place since 2012 and essentially establish a monetary amount for each pick in the draft. This amount incrementally decreases for the first 10 rounds, while Rounds 11-20 assign a uniform amount of $150,000 for each pick. In 2026, the first ten picks’ slot values range from 6.2 to 11.1 million which roughly mirrors the range from last year’s draft. Teams can exceed the threshold for a given pick, however fines await if they exceed their bonus pool, the collective amount associated with all selections in the draft. In essence, penalties on the bonus pool serve as perhaps the only check on a system riddled with unfair advantages for big-market teams (as augmented by the ongoing CBA dispute).
McDermott’s premise is that the Sox can preserve spending power on later picks by offering Emerson a much lower offer sheet than Cholowsky. The conventional wisdom is that an unproven player would have considerably less leverage in that conversation. In fact, analysts who follow the sport intimately have proposed a hierarchy of leverage by draftee type: College Juniors, High School Seniors, and lastly College Seniors. The logic is sound. College Seniors sit at the bottom primarily because their only avenue towards professional baseball in the states is the MLB. Juniors and high schoolers on the other hand can pursue another year (or four) of college eligibility. But does a major rift truly exist between the spending tendencies on College Juniors and high schoolers? A recent International Journal of Sport Finance study explored this question concluding that while bonus differences by prior experience are present, they are almost always concentrated in the pool of players with the least redraft opportunities (aka this is a moot point for the cream of the crop). This makes sense. On face value, it appears quite ludicrous for a franchise to cheapen out on a first-round pick. Empirical evidence appears to back this.1
Bonus Utilization for Top 10 Picks (2012 - 2025) | ||
Draftee Type | # of Players | Average % of Slot Values Utilized |
HS | 52 | 94.3% |
CO | 82 | 91.8% |
Limiting the analysis to more recent years does not change the general trend.
Bonus Utilization for Top 30 Picks (2020 - 2025) | ||
Draftee Type | # of Players | Average % of Slot Values Utilized |
HS | 78 | 94.4% |
CO | 99 | 93.8% |
Bonus Utilization for Top 10 Picks (2020 - 2025) | ||
Draftee Type | # of Players | Average % of Slot Values Utilized |
HS | 22 | 94.0% |
CO | 36 | 92.6% |
Not to mention, organizations are certainly not letting punitive action get in the way of securing their franchise’s future. Since its implementation, bonus pool violations have occurred a collective 260 times across 14 drafts. That roughly comes out to an average of 18 teams per draft which is over half the league. Now in reality most of these instances are eaten up by the powerhouse big-market franchises that already have a demonstrated proclivity to outdo their peers in terms of spending.5 The White Sox, while from Chicago, are not traditionally included in this tier of big-market franchises and have only overspent once (the 2014 draft). Their lack of eagerness should not be taken out of context. Aside from a few Cinderella years during COVID (never forget MVP Abreu), this franchise has, simply put, been pretty irrelevant. They’ve had the worst overall record in baseball over the last ten years and have only reached postseason play three times since the `05 World Series run. There just never was a good reason to open up the ledgers.
This ultimately brings us to the crux of this debate. Any calls to draft a project like Grady Emerson just feel archaic. The Sox are back to being relevant and in an major way. After a rough start to the season, the franchise is producing top-notch offensive output, has a formidable ace in Davis Martin, and are possibly host to the most buzzing story in all of baseball: a rookie Japanese slugging sensation (where have we heard that before?). And unlike the COVID years it doesn’t feel anomalistic.
There is a different optimism in this clubhouse, and a unique grittiness that can only be replicated by a team as youthful as the Sox. Sporting one of the youngest teams in the league and a range of promising prospects in the farm system, for once it feels like the organization has cracked the code for sustainable success. I’d like to be the first to dub this eon in Sox baseball the Montgomery-Murakami championship window. And as we know with all sports, especially baseball, championship windows never increase (unless you’re a certain nerd plotting the downfall of professional basketball from the desks of Oklahoma City).
The Sox need to capitalize now and draft a guy that can be plugged into the 40-man roster in a year or two. Yes there are definitely concerns about Cholowsky’s fit. If the Sox have needs, it doesn’t take Bill James to conclude that the infield isn’t one of them. Colson’s transition to the majors has been seamless and day-by-day his playmaking at the shortstop position is grooming him well for a near-future All-Star appearance. Guys like Vargas, the aforementioned Murakami, Meidroth, and Antonacci round out one of the most solid position groups in baseball and there’s so much more waiting in the farm with the likes of Caleb Bonemer and Billy Carlson (last year’s 10th overall selection). However, these are good problems to have and should never deter an organization from bypassing a potential generational talent like Cholowsky. And not to mention, Cholowsky himself has shown flashes of defensive versatility, having started a majority of rookie appearances at 3rd base.
Ultimately the crowded infield will pose many questions for the organization, but it’s finally time to give the Venable/Getz regime a “win-now” problem to solve and see if one of the youngest front offices in baseball can convert the makings of raw talent into eternal success.
Footnotes:
All slot values and signed bonuses are sourced from Spotrac’s MLB Draft Tracker.
A cutoff of 30 was selected as a standard MLB draft contains 30 selections in the 1st Round (one per team). In reality most drafts end up having more than 30 picks in each round due to league-assigned compensatory picks.
There have been several instances where drafted players went unsigned, usually involving withheld medical history or failed physicals. Ex. Brady Aiken in 2014 and Kumar Rocker in 2021. These players are withheld from this analysis.
When solely analyzing the #1 overall pick the utilization since 2012 is 78% for High Schoolers and 88% for College athletes. However, given the sparseness of the sample size (13 players), it is challenging to attribute the 10% difference to an overarching pattern versus the variance driven by particular athletes.
The Chicago Cubs, San Francisco Giants, and LA Dodgers have exceeded their bonus pool every year that system has been in place. And in that time span (since 2012), the three organizations have accounted for 6 out of 14 World Series wins.
