Baseball's draft can be pretty predictable. Not on a pick-to-pick basis -- no prognosticator can predict even half of the picks right, and that includes the scouts and execs making some of the picks -- but on the whole, things go as expected. There are slot values associated with every pick, and those add up to a club's total bonus pool. The vast majority of picks sign for basically that suggested amount, and under the draft rules of the past two CBAs, a team has never gone more than 5% over its entire pool (because that's where penalties begin). Only rarely does one spend more than 5% below its pool.
But, to be clear: The rules don't include a hard spending cap. Teams can spend whatever they want in the draft -- and, as a matter of fact, there is an amount a team could spend where the penalties would be worth it.
If you're interested in the nitty gritty, Jeff Passan wrote about this concept four years ago when these draft rules were still new in the previous CBA. The basic idea is that if a team goes 15% over its draft pool, it would lose its next two first round picks. I'll go into more detail below on what a haul could look like if a team was willing to spend far over its pool amount, but the broad strokes would be a team with one of the lowest draft pools landing seven or so players who landed between roughly 15 and 60 on its internal version of my rankings -- let's call it one or two players in the 15-to-30 range then five or six more in the top 60. They'd likely come heavily from the high school class where team-by-team evaluations can vary greatly outside of the top tier of players (and where such shenanigans are more feasible than with college players).
Scouts and execs from a number of teams have told me their clubs talk about doing it every year, but it never gets taken seriously by the GM and/or owner. This might be the year it's worth taking that leap.
Why now?
There's a couple key reasons this idea came up in conversations with scouts this spring. First, and simply enough: This is the best draft in about a decade, so you'll get a little more bang for your buck. On top of that, the strength of this year's class is prep position players slotted in the late first- to second-round range. That matters here because prep players are easier to move down the board due to bonus demands associated with college leverage. Also, because they aren't pitchers, these players come with more universal trade value if you're enacting this strategy for a quicker return via trade. Lastly, next year's draft (i.e. one of the picks you'd lose in the penalty) doesn't look particularly great, so teams could think of it as a reallocation of draft resources, pulling the future into the present.