Major League Baseball released the bonus pool amounts that each team is allowed to spend without penalty in the 2015-2016 international signing period. The amounts are much like the draft pools, the worse your record was last season, the more money you are allowed to spend. The Cincinnati Reds have the tenth largest pool of money to spend.

Bonus pool money is up from last year and the Reds are given a limit of $2,873,000 to spend before facing penalties. What makes the international pooling money intriguing is that teams can trade it. There is a whole lot of money out there that could be moved in trades too. The Diamondbacks have the largest amount of pool money, nearly $5.4M, but they aren’t allowed to sign anyone for more than $300,000 because of penalties for going over their limits last year. The Red Sox have the sixth largest pool, nearly $3.7M and also face the same penalty of being unable to sign anyone over the $300,000 mark. Three other teams face the same penalties.

The Reds only had $2,033,400 to spend last year, so they are getting a boost of 41% over that for this upcoming signing period. The boost in pool money is enough to make an additional big time signing or two mid-level signings. Earlier this week we looked back at the players that were signed in the last signing period. There wasn’t a known large bonus signing in the last period. We would have to look at two signing periods ago to find the last known large bonus the team handed out when they signed Jacob Constante for $730,000. They also signed Reydel Medina that year for $400,000.

With more money to work with, perhaps the Reds will sign a few larger bonus players, though they could also use the money to sign a handful of additional mid-tier guys to hedge their bets and hope more players works out better than going all in one one guy for say, $800,000 instead of four guys for $200,000 each.