With 19-year-old prospect Carter Stewart reportedly days away from signing with the SoftBank Hawks of Japan’s Pacific League, here are six things you might want to know:

This is MLB’s doing

By assigning maximum dollar amounts to draft picks in its amateur draft, MLB further reduced the rights amateurs have to sell their talent for a fair value. The draft already hampers this, by forcing amateurs to negotiate with only one team. But the signing bonus pools, introduced in 2012, and the decrepit status of minor league baseball, has now made Japan a viable alternative for the right candidate.

Nippon Professional Baseball teams, like those in the majors, are limited to how much they can pay amateurs acquired through the draft process, and these limits are much lower. While players used to receive millions of dollars under the table, those days appear to be over and the maximums of a 100 million yen ($905,000) signing bonus and 15 million yen ($136,000) first-year salary.

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