On Tuesday, Major League Baseball and Mexico’s Liga Mexicana de Beisbol (LMB) agreed to a new posting system to allow MLB teams to sign players out of Mexico. The agreement ends an eight-month standoff between the two leagues.
Major League Baseball had banned all transactions with LMB last July, citing corruption and fraud. LMB teams would often sign players as young as 15 to professional contracts and then insist upon up to 75 percent of any signing bonus that the player might get from an MLB team down the line. Some MLB team, most notably the Cubs, used this loophole to get around the penalties on signing bonuses since only the amount of money the player received (and not the total amount of bonus money paid) counted towards the international bonus limits created in the last few collective bargaining agreements.