FORT MYERS, FLA. -- The Rule 5 draft in Major League Baseball allows teams to pay a price to select players with a specific professional seniority from other teams that have not placed those players on their 40-player big-league roster.
The process of claiming players from other teams is said to date to 1892, when there was a National League and the American League was nine years from joining the fun.
The first time this maneuver was referred to as the Rule 5 draft is said to have occurred in 1941. Obviously, this has nothing to do with chronology, since the Rule 4 draft involves the selection of high school, college and other amateur players, and that more famous draft did not start until 1965.
I was writing a column for Thursday's print edition on Ryan Pressly, the reliever who came to the Twins in the Rule 5 draft of 2012. He is one of the Twins of longest-standing among the Rule 5 players that have been taken since Calvin Griffith moved his Washington franchise here seven weeks before the 1960 winter meetings and that Rule 5 draft.
This informative piece -- http://twinstrivia.com/twins-rule-5-draft-history/ -- on the Twins' Rule 5 history was produced recently by John Swol at twinstrivia.com. As you can discover reading it, the Rule 5 was much more active in the Twins' early seasons.
Reason: Marvin Miller was not hired until 1966 as the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, to start pointing out clearly to the athletes all the methods the owners were using to keep salaries at paltry levels.
If you could keep the entry level dollars at a minimum, you could do the same in the major leagues ... that was the owners' reasoning. And it worked for a long, long time.
The major leagues had a "bonus baby'' rule that started in 1947. In its original form, any player receiving a signing bonus of more than $4,000 – that's 45 grand today – had to spend two full seasons with the big-league team signing him or be placed on waivers.