2016 MLB Draft order: The first 77 picks

The MLB Draft runs from June 9-11 this season, and the Philadelphia Phillies are unofficially on the clock. It's less than a week until the big day -- a three-day event that begins on Thursday. The first day will wrap up the first two rounds and coverage of that begins at 7:00pm ET. That will also cover the compensation and competitive balance round A -- which are both sandwiched between the first and second round -- and competitive balance round B. In simpler terms, that's the first 77 picks of the draft.

How is the draft order determined?

The simple answer is that the draft order is determined by the previous season's standings. In the event of a tie, the previous season's win-loss record is used with the worse team getting the better pick. That explains the order of picks 1-23 this year.

What are compensation picks?

For pick 24 and beyond, draft order gets a bit trickier. First of all, if a team signed a free agent who was attached to a qualifying offer from another team, the team that signs the free agent forfeits their first-round pick. If a team signs more than one player attached to a qualifying offer, they forfeit their next-highest pick and so on.

The team that lost their free agent then gets a compensation pick that is tacked onto the end of the first round. Those are then also sorted by the previous season's standings and account for picks 24-34.

Put simply, 11 free agents got offered qualifying offers this past offseason and then signed with a different team. As compensation, the team that lost the player, got an extra pick.

What is the competitive balance lottery?

A pair of competitive balance rounds fall after the first and second rounds and account for picks 35-41 and 71-77.

The competitive balance lottery was designed as a way to afford smaller market teams a small advantage in the draft. Teams that have either one of the 10 smallest markets or one of the 10 smallest revenue pools are eligible for twelve available picks (six each round). That means there's a possibility of 20 teams to be involved in the lottery, though, the two aforementioned criteria usually yield some overlap. This past season, 15 teams were eligible meaning three were not awarded a pick.

The teams are then drawn lottery style, and announced well in advance of the draft. The astute reader may have noticed that the competitive balance rounds consist of more than 12 picks though -- 14 in fact. This year, these rounds also house two compensation picks -- one each round -- for teams that failed to sign last year's player selection. This isn't typically a normal occurrence; the team that fails to sign their draft pick will get the immediately subsequent pick in the following year's draft. Those just happen to fall during the competitive balance rounds this year.

These are the only draft picks that are able to be traded per league rules.

What is the order for the 2016 MLB Draft?

Competitive Balance Lottery Round A

Second Round

Competitive Balance Lottery Round B