MLB Draft Lottery Odds: How the Top Six Picks Work

MLB’s draft lottery decides the top six picks of the first round by weighted chance, gives each of the three worst teams a 16.5% shot at the number-one pick, and was created in the 2022 CBA specifically to make tanking less rewarding. Everything from the seventh pick down is still plain reverse order of the standings. If you want the odds, the table is below.

Why baseball added a lottery

For most of its history MLB simply awarded the first pick to the worst team, which gave struggling clubs a clear incentive to lose as many games as possible. The 2022 collective bargaining agreement changed that, introducing a lottery for the first time ahead of the 2023 draft, per MLB’s own explanation. The design borrows from the NBA and NHL but decides more picks, six, and flattens the very top so no single record guarantees the prize.

The MLB lottery odds table

All 18 non-playoff teams are entered. The three worst records share identical top odds, a deliberate move to remove any benefit from being the single worst team. Here is the weighting used for the top pick:

Standings position (worst record first)	Odds of 1st pick
1 (tie)	16.5%
2 (tie)	16.5%
3 (tie)	16.5%
4	13.25%
5	10.0%
6	7.5%
7	5.5%
8	3.9%
9	2.7%
10	1.8%
11–18	declining below 1.4% down to about 0.2%

Because the top three are tied, there is no reward for finishing 100th out of 100 games versus 99th. That flattening is the whole anti-tanking idea, and live trackers like Tankathon’s MLB page recompute the odds as the standings settle.

Only the top six are drawn

The lottery stops at six. Once those picks are pulled, the remaining non-playoff teams slot in by reverse standings for picks seven onward, and the playoff teams draft last. So a bad-but-not-terrible team can still land a high-single-digit pick the old-fashioned way, while the top of the board is left to chance among the strugglers.

The revenue-sharing guardrails

Baseball added a second layer the NBA and NHL handle differently: limits tied to a club’s revenue-sharing status. A team that pays into revenue sharing cannot receive a lottery pick in more than two consecutive years, and a team that receives revenue sharing is capped at three straight years. The effect is to stop any franchise from settling at the bottom of the standings to harvest elite picks season after season, per the MLB and MLBPA CBA. Tank for one year and you are fine; tank as a strategy and the rules cut you off.

How it stacks up against other leagues

Each sport tuned its lottery to its own tanking problem. The NHL draws only the top two picks and lets the worst team reach 18.5%; you can compare the mechanics in our NHL draft lottery odds explainer. MLB went wider and flatter, six picks with a three-way tie at the top, and bolted on the revenue-sharing limits above. The trade-off is that baseball’s format spreads the luck across more teams but makes any single top pick less predictable.

That is the balance MLB chose: enough randomness to kill the incentive to lose on purpose, enough weighting that genuinely bad teams still get real chances at franchise talent. For the money side of the same competitive-balance toolkit, our MLB luxury tax explainer covers how the sport tries to rein in its biggest spenders. The odds here reflect the current format introduced in 2022; the framework is up for renegotiation when the CBA expires after 2026, so confirm the live weightings before each draft.