When the clock strikes midnight Friday, the signing deadline for baseball’s amateur draft will pass. By then, most if not all of the 10 first-round picks who have yet to sign as of this writing will presumably have done so. That things have gone even as far as they have, though, is a sign of how badly the draft system, which was reformed two years ago for something like the 793rd time in its 43-year history, is broken.

The deadline, first introduced last year, is designed to lessen the leverage amateurs have with teams and so lessen the amount of money they have to be paid. In the past, when negotiations went badly, a draftee could just hold out, threatening to re-enter the draft pool the next year and leave the team that picked him with nothing. Ace agent Scott Boras tended to use this nervy tactic more than most; perhaps most famously, in 2004 his client Jered Weaver held out a full calendar year before finally signing a deal with the Los Angeles Angels.

Under the new rules, though, this sort of plan won’t work, because everyone has between the June 7 draft and August 15 to negotiate a deal. If a player doesn’t sign, he goes into the next year’s draft pool and the team that didn’t sign him gets a compensatory pick. If, for instance, Pittsburgh fails to sign Vanderbilt junior and no. 2 overall pick Pedro Alvarez by the deadline, Alvarez will be ineligible to sign with anyone until he’s drafted again next June and Pittsburgh will get the no. 3 overall pick next year. An exception is made for college seniors, who can sign at any point up until next June, but as nearly all elite prospects are college juniors and high school seniors, this isn’t as important as you might think.

Together with central baseball’s recommendations for how high a bonus each draft slot should be worth, this policy is designed to reduce an amateur’s options to signing the deal the team wants him to sign, playing independent ball, or going back to school. (The latter two are risky, because players risk hurting their stock.) While sounding sinister, this is actually well-intentioned. The main idea is clearly to artificially suppress the amount of money prospects make, but if the system worked as advertised, it would also ensure that the worst teams picked the best amateurs without paying mind to financial considerations.

The problem, though, is that the system doesn’t work. According to the San Jose Mercury News, for instance, no. 5 overall pick Buster Posey is about to sign with San Francisco and net a $7.5 million bonus. That’s $1.35 million more than Tampa Bay paid top overall pick Tim Beckham. Last year, when the recommended bonus for the first overall pick was $3.6 million, the Yankees paid no. 30 pick Andrew Brackman a $3.3 million bonus, and Detroit paid no. 28 pick Rick Porcello a $3.58 million bonus. Baltimore signed Matt Wieters, taken no. 5 overall, to a deal with a $6 million bonus, the highest in the draft.

Don’t blame teams that are wisely investing in top talent; they’re doing nothing wrong. The blame attaches to central baseball for setting up a system with no real enforcement mechanism. Team executives can moan to the heavens about being unable to pay above the recommended slot price, but as the above examples show, they have no credibility at all when they do so.

In fact, a setup meant to route the best young players to the worst teams almost ensures the opposite result. Agents have every incentive to loudly advertise outrageous demands before the draft in hopes that poorer teams will pass on their clients, leaving them to rich teams willing to spend more than they’re supposed to. They also have every incentive to get into the kind of negotiating showdowns they’re now in, and, given enough of those, the inevitable result is that some agents and players will call baseball’s bluff by going off to the independent leagues or back to school. So far as that will retard the development of some of the very best American amateurs and keep them off the rosters of the teams most in need of help, it’s a horrible outcome.

The current system will only work if all teams buy into it, but that’s not going to happen. (If it were, it would have happened by now.) It’s too early to know whether tonight’s deadline will prove to be an epic disaster, as it could be if a full third of first rounders don’t even sign, or just a close call, but either way, reform number 794 is sure to be in the offing before long.

tmarchman@nysun.com