Buried in a very long (and very good) roundtable-type piece on the state of baseball at ESPN, Kiley McDaniel slipped in this little nugget on the new Collective Bargaining Agreement (emphasis mine):

There’s also a cascading set of secondary issues that will greatly affect young players who are increasingly the most valued and important players in the game.

On the simple end of things, changing Super Two arbitration and ending service-time manipulation will change when you see young potential stars on the field (hopefully sooner) and how good your team will be. One step deeper than that, the expected addition of trading draft picks, the addition of an international draft and the trading of picks in that new draft could completely change team-building strategies for years to come while solving some of the competitive-balance issues that have plagued the sport. If a new GM steps into a farm system with a big league club full of players who aren’t their type, or an existing GM wants to change strategies on a dime, this additional talent-based liquidity will make trades much easier to pull off while also empowering scouts to have a real reason to scout every player on Earth.

I’m sorry, did you say the expected addition of trading draft picks? As in, the inside dish expectation right now is that the new CBA will include the ability to freely trade draft picks? Like, tradable next year? Hello!

Kumar Rocker entered 2021 as the consensus top Draft prospect and has excelled over his first seven starts. He won all seven with a tidy 0.84 ERA, posting a .137 opponents’ average and a 61/12 K/BB ratio in 43 innings.

Fellow Vanderbilt right-hander Jack Leiter has been even better. He no-hit South Carolina for nine innings in his first career Southeastern Conference start and Missouri for seven innings before departing in his second. He also has seven wins in as many starts, and his numbers verge on the ridiculous: 0.43 ERA, .074 opponents’ average, 71/16 K/BB ratio in 42 innings.

“It’s like watching Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris from 1961,” an area scout who covers Vanderbilt said. “It’s two guys who are clearly elite in their field.”

Major League Baseball has settled on a 20-round draft for the 2021 season, J.J. Cooper of Baseball America reports. That outcome has long seemed likely, as it is the minimum number of rounds required in the 2020 agreement between MLB and the MLBPA. While it’s obviously a step up from last year’s five-round event, the 20-round length still clocks in at half the length of the standard 40-round draft.

This year’s draft was already set to look quite a bit different. For starters, it’s been known for months that the event will be moved back to July. Major League Baseball also announced back in November the formation of the MLB Draft League — a six-team showcase league that will offer some of the country’s top amateurs the opportunity to compete against one another in the weeks leading up to the draft. There’s also been talk of an NFL-style combine of sorts, which would give clubs more up to date medical information on potential draftees. Pushing the draft back until after the College World Series and state high school tournament completions also avoids injury risk for top talent after the draft.

Dodger legend Paul Goldschmidt stepped into the batter’s box as Toronto Blue Jays starter Aaron Nola looked in for the sign. The Los Angeles first baseman stood tall, with a bat draped over his shoulder as Nola stepped into a four-seamer intended for the inside half of the plate. Goldschmidt was early on it, but pulled it into play and passed a diving Kris Bryant.

Third basemen Gavin Lux dashed home to tie the game and Cody Bellinger scored shortly after to give LA the lead (Yankee Justin Turner watched from his couch). Nola’s day was done, and Toronto manager John Gibbons stepped out from the dugout to signal for a lefty to try to save their season — James Paxton.

To the untrained eye, this is Major League Baseball. But it is only an echo of the baseball we know today — a bizarro world where a collective bargaining disaster put Scott Boras out of work and led to every high schooler signing with the team that drafted them. Mike Trout is still an Angel and Jacob deGrom a Met, but in this world, Aaron Judge is an Athletic and Trea Turner a Pirate (at least until they traded him before his arbitration price got too high).

MLB gained the right to host a combine or combine-like event in either 2020 or 2021 last March, as part of its agreement with the MLB Players Association. (MLB also gained the power to reduce the draft in both years, with last year’s checking in at five rounds and this year’s requiring at least 20 rounds.) The sources who spoke to CBS Sports in recent days provided an outline of the league’s vision and potential adjacent plans. Here are some details:

A 2021 MLB Draft combine would likely be hosted in Cary, North Carolina, home of the USA Baseball National Training Complex, and would take place in June.

The combine would allow for medical testing and some person-to-person interaction.

It’s unclear who MLB intends to invite to the event or how many prospects would attend, but it would take place almost simultaneously with a high school tournament hosted by USA Baseball and MLB. That tournament would also be played at the training complex. College players would likely arrive a day or two after play began, one source said.