The first thing to know is that it doesn’t directly affect where the Phillies will pick in next year’s MLB Draft. The Phillies will pick 25th in the first round. The second thing to know is that if you haven’t been following things, you may not realize that this is the fourth year that Major League Baseball has held a draft lottery which was adopted in the last Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between MLB and the Player’s Association.
There are a number of somewhat complicated rules governing the Lottery and which teams can pick where. For instance, the Phillies have the 26th pick in the first round. The Yankees, who would have picked 25th are penalized for exceeding the Competitive Balance Tax (CBT) threshold. The Dodgers and Mets are also punished, and like the Yankees, will have their first round pick dropped by 10 spots, which puts the Yankees at 35 and pushes the Dodgers pick to 40th. As for the Mets, they are in the Draft Lottery and therefore have a shot at moving up from their 14th spot in the first round. If they move up into the first six picks of the draft, their second round pick will be dropped 10 spots and they will stay where they are in the first round.
Teams also can not pick in the lottery in more than two consecutive years, so that bumps Colorado out of the lottery even though they had baseball’s worst record at 43-119 in 2025. Colorado picked third in 2024 and fourth in 2025. The Angels and Nationals are also not eligible to get a lottery pick because they both paid into the league’s revenue sharing program and both had lottery picks last season. The rules – I told you this was complicated – do not allow a team that pay revenue sharing to have lottery picks in back-to-back years.
The Rockies, National and Angels can pick no earlier than 10th overall. The White Sox were hit by that rule last season after they lost 121 games in 2024 because they had the number five pick in 2024 and were bumped out of the lottery last season.
As with the NBA Draft Lottery, teams odds of getting the first pick are weighted. The White Sox (27.73-percent), Twins (22.18-percent) and Pirates (16.81-percent) are the only teams with more than a 10-percent chance of getting the top pick. As for the Phillies division rivals, the Braves have a 4.54-percent chance of winning the lottery, Miami is at 1.85-percent and the Mets are at 0.67-percent. The Nats and Phillies are ineligible.
The actual picking was done Tuesday afternoon, but the event will be televised at 5:30 on the MLB Network.
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