Gunnar Alm happily hit the road Sunday afternoon, leaving Polk County to return to his dorm room at North Carolina State.
Alm didn’t hear his name called during this weekend’s Major League Baseball Draft, but it wasn’t due to a lack of interest. Nearly half of MLB’s 30 teams called Alm and his agent on Saturday and Sunday and expressed interest in selecting the recent Polk County graduate.
But Alm and team had already agreed on how large a signing bonus a team would have to offer in order for him to leave N.C. State. While some teams came close, no team met the number, and with the way the financial rules of the draft are structured, that meant no team would invest a draft pick in Alm.
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And that proved OK with the Wolfpack freshman.
“No regrets,” Alm said. “The numbers I was offered, you don’t feel good turning those down. I’ve never seen that much money. But now the goal is to be in a better spot than as a high schooler in two years.
“I turned down a lot more money than I was comfortable turning down, to be honest. It was phone calls all day – will you take this, will you take that? But I love it at school. When I got to school, my number went up, to be honest. We have some awesome resources.”
The MLB Draft operates under a bonus pool system in which each pick in the first 10 rounds carries an assigned slot value. A team’s total bonus pool is the sum of all those slot values combined. Teams are free to sign players for more or less than their assigned slot value, but exceeding the overall bonus pool by more than five percent triggers significant penalties, including the loss of future draft picks.
That flexibility creates a common strategy in which teams sign some players for less than their slot value – known as signing “under slot” – in order to free up money to sign another player for more than his slot value. A player being asked to sign under slot actually holds leverage in that situation, because the team needs those savings to make the rest of its draft class work.
If a team and player can’t reach an agreement, the team loses that pick’s slot value from its bonus pool entirely and cannot redirect that money elsewhere, a costly outcome that puts pressure on both sides to find common ground.
Alm’s number was more than $1 million, meaning he would likely have needed to be chosen in the first three rounds to land in a slot equal to or exceeding his figure. Outside that range, a team had to be willing to overpay in a slot to select him. None were.
“The big thing with the draft is the number,” Alm said. “There were 25 or 30 of us high schoolers that did the same thing. Some of them got offered a lot of money. A lot. But we’re all betting on going to school and being able to (quadruple) that number in a couple of years.”
Alm will next be eligible for the draft in 2028, following his sophomore season. He has been on the N.C. State campus since late June, taking part in workouts, helping with summer camps and learning the advantages a Division I program can offer.
Longtime Wolfpack head coach Elliott Avent announced his retirement in May, and the program turned to 11-year assistant coach Chris Hart as his successor. That more than suited Alm, as Hart recruited him while at Polk County.
“Coach Hart is really the only one that did the recruiting the last few years,” Alm said. “I’m excited that he got the job.
“The resources that we have are just amazing. If I can’t make myself better there in the next two years, I can’t get better.”
