Red Sox have $2.78 million international bonus pool, but can't really leverage it

Baseball America has revealed the international bonus pools for individual teams, with the Red Sox coming in around the middle at $2,783,800.

(Draft bonus pools are likewise included, but not quite finalized yet, so let's hold off on those for now.)

It may feel like the Sox should be up towards the top of the list after 2015, but even with another last-place finish, between a decent start (easily forgotten) and a strong finish, they did a little too much winning to find themselves at the bottom of the overall standings. Their last-place finish is in no small part due to the East being such a solid division at the moment.

So how does this matter? For the Red Sox, it doesn't really have that big of an impact. They're still under penalty from signing Yoan Moncada (a class which also brought Anderson Espinoza into the fold), meaning they won't be able to sign any player for more than $300,000 anyways.

In fact, to project a bit further out, it's not hard to imagine that these figures will also be relatively unimportant once those restrictions are lifted. After all, simply spending up to the point where there's no penalties year after year will leave a team dropping somewhere in the vicinity of $10-15 million every three years. For comparison, in the 2014-15 period, the Red Sox were able to drop more than $35 million on the market. If a team believes that the international market is an efficient use of their resources, it only makes sense to go big whenever the opportunity presents itself, two-year penalties be damned.

The worst-case scenario for such a team is that there's some phenom who pops up that they for some reason prefer far-and-away above the one they signed to incur the penalty in the first place. And even when that happens, if said prospect appears in the second year of penalties, they might even just end up waiting long enough to get a preferred destination or certain big-spenders in the market.

So the Red Sox have a middling-sized bonus pool for a middling finish in 2015. They'll probably use up all of it because, y'know, why not? But we've still got a year to go before they're back in the marquee signing picture. And then the bonus pool won't matter for entirely more exciting reasons.