Yesterday, baseball had some good news. Yankees and Mets fans, especially, should be happy: They should even send flowers and gift baskets to Detroit.

The good news is that the Tigers signed New Jersey’s Rick Porcello, their first-round pick in this year’s draft. Porcello, a Scott Boras client, was widely regarded as the best high school pitching prospect in the draft, and perhaps the best full stop. But he fell all the way down to the Tigers at no. 27 because of concerns that he would demand a large signing bonus, and that he would attend the University of North Carolina if he didn’t get it. Happily, the Tigers bought him out of an education with the richest contract ever given to a high school player. The deal will guarantee him $7.3 million and place him on the Tigers’ 40-man roster, thus surpassing the $7 million deal Josh Beckett earned coming out of high school in 1999.

You might wonder why you (or the Yankees or Mets) should care one way or the other about how much the Tigers are shelling out for some kid barely old enough to shave. By doling out so much cash to Porcello, the Tigers are sticking it to the man — and are making it easier for New York’s teams to do so as well.

One of the oddities of baseball’s current economic structure is the draft slotting system. In an effort to hold down the signing bonuses earned by amateur talent, the commissioner’s office has, for the last several years, been “suggesting” to scouting directors how much draft picks should be paid. The nominal purpose is to ensure that the worst, and often poorest, teams in the game (which draft first) have access to the same talent rich, successful teams do. A top talent can say he’s not signing for a dime less than $10 million but, at least in theory, the team can say, “The commissioner told me I can only pay you $2.3 million. My hands are tied!” It also doesn’t hurt that if all teams buy in, they can collectively spend less on the draft.

The word for this is “collusion,” and it’s aided and abetted by the player’s union, which has to assent to draft policy because draft picks are tied to free agent signings. It’s in the union’s interest to keep draft bonuses low because the money not spent on pimply teenagers should, at least in theory, go to its members.

Common sense should tell anyone that owners colluding and a union signing off on a policy directed at people it doesn’t represent is wrong, and indeed this policy is wrong. It also works against the interests of many ball clubs — as Porcello’s fall shows, it doesn’t actually steer the best talent to the poorest teams, and it does constrain teams that have money and the will to spend it. The Mets, for instance, drafted pitcher Pedro Beato in the 17th round in 2005, and had exclusive rights to sign him up until the 2006 draft. They didn’t, because his stock had risen in the meantime and he — sensibly enough — wanted a bonus reflecting his first-round talent. The Mets didn’t agree, and the Baltimore Orioles drafted him last year, paying him a $1 million bonus that the Mets could have scrounged up out of the cushions in the home locker room at Shea, had they not been hamstrung by this dumb policy.

Happily, this policy is completely unenforceable, because the union has yet to sign off on anything formalizing it. Clubs are under much the same obligation to listen to central baseball’s suggested bonuses, as you are to listen to my suggestion that you buy me real estate overlooking Central Park. The process is that if a team wants to go over slot, it first has to inform the commissioner’s office that it is going to do so, and then prepare to be scowled at, pleaded with, and possibly sulked at as well. Bizarrely enough, this generally works, and so the commissioner’s office has been aggressive in trying to hold down draft bonuses. Baseball America has reported that this year, for example, teams are being encouraged to pay their draftees 10% less than what players taken at the same draft position got last year.

The Tigers have not listened. Last year, Boston paid Jason Place, the 27th pick, $1.3 million. Rather than offering Porcello 10% less, they’re offering him 624% of what Place made — doubtless a shrewd strategy, given Porcello’s glowing scouting reports and the Tigers’ recent excellence in developing pitching.

This is good for baseball because it shows that at least one team is willing to invest in its product, even if it will earn that team a nasty phone call from Bud Selig or one of the Morlocks working for him. Let’s keep in mind that this checkbook baseball is being practiced not by George Steinbrenner, but the Tigers, who just four years ago fielded perhaps the worst team in major league history and still play in a city where you can buy a downtown Victorian mansion for $15,000. It’s good for you because the game is improved by teams willing to invest in themselves. And it’s good for the Mets and Yankees because they have enormous financial advantages over most every other team, which they’ve freely exercised in the international amateur market but one they’ve only carefully exercised in the draft lately. With the Tigers making the equivalent of an obscene gesture toward this frivolous slotting mechanism, maybe the Mets and Yankees will even be inspired to start thinking more about their fans than about how well they’re adhering to a policy that makes about as much sense as buying your favorite local columnist some Central Park property.

tmarchman@nysun.com