Quote from Brian Connelly on December 12, 2020, 3:42 pm

No problem.  Without this protection, there would be huge amounts of "stealing" other teams prospects and stashing them in your minors for a season.   The extra roster of protected guys ensures stability, and makes it extremely unlikely that any guy left exposed here ever gets to, let alone makes an impact at the MLB level.  Essentially Minors "organization" guys.  Until a few years ago there used to be 2 levels of Minors draft, a "AAA" and a "AA".  But hardly anyone got picked in "AA" (3 full rosters of only "eligible" players being protected didn't leave many out), so they eliminated it.

I'd never listened to it before.  In the Minors portion, they would refer to the specific roster from which the guy was taken, like "Texas selects C Johel Pozo from San Diego's AA roster".  There are rosters down to "Rookie".  Guys eligible to be picked on service time from AA down are fair game.  AA down roughly approximate the players the team expects to be at that level, but AAA is the big exception:  it's (most) Minors FA you just signed for 2021, and all your best prospects that were exposed in Rule 5.

But Pozo's situation was weird.  Minors FA; chose to sign with Padres, but they had so many guys to protect on Minors roster they didn't protect him, and Texas --his original team-- took him back.