Originally published at The Tenth Inning Stretch

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It has been pretty much a tradition at The Tenth Inning Stretch to live blog the MLB rule 4 Draft from the Twins' perspective. I will cover every single pick all 3 days of the draft

I will follow what I did in 2010, which is:

Live draft coverage on each day of the draft, both with live blogging and on twitter. I will tweet each pick as happens, then I will blog details about the player including scouting reports, projections, videos etc, in this space. You can follow me on twitter @thrylos98, or you can come here and refresh the page often. My tweets will appear on the left hand side of the page, as always. I will do a single post with the details of each draftee.

At the end of the draft, I will have the reactions of the players drafted, about being drafted by the Twins and also have more detailed profiles of the new Twins, as they sign. These profiles would be very similar to my top 22 pitcher profiles I did before the draft.

To see the individual profiles in 2010 (and the reactions piece on top) so you have an idea of what the coverage will be like, they are all at this link.

All the 2012 MLB Draft picks, profiles and related posts (including this one) will be at this link . Not that I will be blogging much else during the draft, but that link is 2012 Draft exclusive content.

A reminder about what this draft includes: The Rule 4 Draft, or the First-Year Player Draft (all those 3 things are synonyms), includes players who are residents of the U.S., Canada and U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands and Minor Outlying Islands. Residents of other countries are not subject to the Rule 4 Draft, but are signed as free agents either when they are young (the majority of Latin American, European, African and Australian players) or when are established (the majority of Japanese players.) Free agents have the ability to negotiate with each team and actually, depending on the perceived value of a player, induce a bidding war for their services. Thus, a lot of Cuban refugees do not take residence in the U.S. or a territory, so they will not be subjected to the amateur draft, but take residence in a Latin American country like Bolivia or Mexico. The minor league draft is a way for organizations to restock their systems.

With the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, each pick in the draft hasa bonus ceiling. The sum of those bonus ceilings is the maximum a team can spend in the draft (bonus allotment). There are severe penalties for surpassing their bonus allotment, including fines and losses of future 1st round draft picks. So most teams will stay tight within their allotment. However, a team like the Twins can sign their first round pick to a $5.7 million bonus instead of the allotted $6.2 and have an extra $500K to spend in another pick. Because of all the supplemental picks and the fact that are picking second in every round (but the second where they are picking third because of the Willingham signing), the Twins have the highest bonus allotment in the draft with $12,368,200.

Another housekeeping item: I have been re-posting a lot of the content here at the Twins Dailysite also, a great site, btw, make sure you join and participate. A can't miss for every Twins' fan. Because of the time urgency (and because I do not want to clutter their site with 25 posts a day), I will be live blogging the Twins 2012 MLB Draft only at The Tenth Inning Stretch. Might post some summary posts there after all is settled later next week.