Where Will the Chicago Cubs Draft in 2024? There's Actually a Range of Possibilities

With the regular season in the books, we can now lay out the chalk MLB Draft order, and also discuss the lottery odds that could see the Chicago Cubs’ pick move.

The Cubs finished the season with the 14th best record, which would place them at pick 17, and, when it comes to the lottery, that’s just about the worst place you can be. You didn’t make the playoffs AND you have virtually no chance of really popping up to the top of the 2024 MLB Draft. Only the Mariners are lower among lottery teams. (Worse – again, if you want to care about this stuff! – the Cubs finished with just one more win than the Reds, Padres, and Yankees. The Cubs’ chalk spot COULD have easily been 14th, or one spot lower than they got stud prospect Matt Shaw in the 2023 draft.)

OK, but where will the Cubs actually draft in 2024? Well, as you know, there’s a draft lottery now, so I can’t tell you for certain where the Cubs will pick until the lottery takes place in December.

What I can say is that the Cubs are in the 17th spot, and if nothing funky happens in the lottery, that’s where the Cubs will pick (but hold onto that thought!). You can, of course, still get a very good prospect at 17, but historically and normalized across a distribution of enough players, the difference between the top five or six picks and the rest of the first round is pretty enormous. So, unless the Cubs jump up in the lottery, there’s probably not a ton of difference between picking 17 and picking 13 or whatever (this is my response to the first parenthetical a couple paragraphs ago).

So, can the Cubs jump? Well, technically yes! Probably? No.

First of all, the Cubs’ chances of getting the first overall pick are just 0.36%. I’ve been smacking that ‘simulate lottery’ button on Tankathon for a while, and I still haven’t gotten one where the Cubs land on top.

Fortunately, the top six picks – not just the top overall pick – are lottery-eligible, so the Cubs could also bump up to pick two, three, four, five, or six. Unfortunately, those odds are also really slim. In total, the Cubs have just a 3.4-ish percent chance of jumping up into the top six picks. About 1 in 30 lotteries, you’d expect to see the Cubs jump. If it happens, you better do a dance, because that’s some seriously wild luck.

Also, because there’s a 2-ish percent chance that the Mariners jump, the Cubs do also have a correspondingly small chance of falling to pick 18.

So the Cubs are almost certainly picking 17th? NOPE! I TOLD YOU TO STAY TUNED!

That’s because there are three teams picking ahead of the Cubs (the Mets, Padres, and Yankees) that are expected to be more than $40 million over the first luxury tax tier. When that happens, a team’s first round pick is dropped 10 spots (unless they jump into the top six picks). The Mets, because of their abysmal record, actually have a pretty good chance of winding up in the top six picks. But the Padres and Yankees are pretty close to the Cubs, and are unlikely to jump.

In other words, if you’re talking about the MOST LIKELY spot for the Cubs to be picking in the first round of 2024, it’s pick 15.