MLB Draft – An Overhaul

I’ve been reading a lot and comparing MLB’s draft with basketball and football.  And it got me wondering – has anything been a bigger crapshoot than the Major League Baseball Draft of its amateur players?

Since 1965 when Rick Monday was drafted overall number one by the then Kansas City Athletics, do you know how many of those overall number one picks have made it to the Hall of Fame?  I’ll give you a hint.  It’s a round number…the one that rhymes with hero.

In that time, eight NFL players selected number one have gone to induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton and 10 NBA players selected number one have gone on to election to the Basketball HOF in Springfield, MA.

Not only is the success rate of the overall number one draft pick fairly low, so is the success of most number one draft picks.  From 1965 to 2003, of the 1,038 players taken in the first round by all teams, only 183 of those players made All-Star status.  A pedestrian 18%.  And it varies wildly from year to year as the graph below illustrates.

So, I asked myself why is there such a problem with the MLB draft?

There a three major factors:

1.  Player Development

There aren’t player development leagues for the NBA and the NFL.  Those leagues mostly use colleges in the US and in the case of basketball, sometimes a player will be drafted from a foreign professional league.  Unlike its sister leagues, in baseball it’s extremely rare that a player jumps directly from amateur status to the Major Leagues.  So rare that since the draft began in 1965, only 19 selections have advanced directly to the major leagues from amateur.  That’s less than one ever two years.  Amazing.

Clearly the draft is not very good in identifying MLB ready players.  It’s not even good at identifying potential MLB-ers.

2.  Eligibility

To be drafted a player must fit the following criteria:

• Be a resident of the United States, Canada, or a U.S. territory such as Puerto Rico. Players from other countries are not subject to the draft, and can be signed by any team (unless they are current members of college teams in the aforementioned countries).
• Have never signed a major or minor league contract.
• High school players are eligible only after graduation, and if they have not attended college.
• Players at four-year colleges are eligible after completing their junior years, or after their twenty-first birthdays. The exception to this is Division III schools, where players can be drafted before their junior year.
• Junior and community college players are eligible to be drafted at any time.

3.  Players from Foreign Lands

As stated in the criteria above, they are not eligible for the draft.  What?  Not eligible?

For these players, it’s basically a free for all. There is no draft.  If the team happens to have a training camp in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Venezuela, etc., and signs a young player to a contract at age 16, he’s yours.  And he’s yours until he’s traded (highly unlikely), released (more likely) or makes it to the big club and becomes a free agent (again highly unlikely).

And the team is taking a kid from a foreign country and plunking him down in some small town USA, where he is in culture shock, mostly on his own and trying to compete for a job at the tender age of 18.

All bets are off for Cuban defectors and players from Japan and Korea.  Boston paid over $50M just for the opportunity to sign Daisuke Matsuzaka (aka Dice-K).

Clearly the system is broken.

The Overhaul

In order to create order out of this chaos, MLB has to recognize that they have an issue and instead of a piecemeal fix, baseball has to make a wholesale change to the draft and also to player development.

The teams need to recognize that there is a better way to do this, one that will benefit all teams and will allow them to have a draft that is meaningful to the parent clubs and could potentially save them millions of dollars in bonus money to players that statistically will never amount to much.

So, lets say in my bizarro parallel universe, that these two things happen:

• That MLB is ready and willing to make a wholesale change in how they work with player development.
• That the teams agree to help other teams save money by pooling resources at the lowest level in order to increase balance at the higher levels

Issue 1:

The pool of players that they have to choose from is probably in the hundreds of thousands, but there are only 1200 real positions available, that is 30 teams each with a 40 man roster.

The roster positions in Single A, Double A and Triple A ball are filled with players who simply will never make the show.

Issue 2:

Either foreign players are overhyped by zealous agents to the point of affordability to only rich teams (see every Cuban defector and every Japanese/Korean player not named Ichiro) or they are at worst, exploited by an underworld of bird dog scouts and not so honest brokers.  Not in every case, I am sure, but there has to be a better way of doing things.

Issue 3:

I’ll call this leveling the playing field.  For the most part, the NBA and the NFL knows what they are getting when they draft a player.  There is a body of work that can be evaluated based on statistics, competition, combines and interviews.  In the case of the combines in the NFL every team is there to interview measure, poke and prod each and every one of the players invited.  And they invite just about every player that they believe will be drafted in the 7 rounds of their draft.  And in the case of the NBA with foreign players, they are drafted, and the team drafting the player is limited to the money they can spend to buy the player out of his current contract.

How does baseball efficiently whittle the pool of hundreds of thousands of amateur players around the world down to the players that they believe will contribute someday at the major league level?

Solution

Keep all of the A and AA league teams, but transfer the affiliations to Major League Baseball.  The cost of operations of these teams are shared equally by all teams.  And baseball needs to recognize have some of your top tier baseball players (all Catholic, all-league, all NY State) get invited to play A-ball.  Hold tryouts after the invites have gone out and fill the extra roster spots from the players who decide to go to college instead of entering the pro ranks.

Eligible players:  those graduated from HS, or JC/Community college and those over 18 from foreign countries.

The A teams will be regional in nature.  The first year pros will play their home games within 100 miles of their homes.  This will alleviate many of the cultural and homesickness issues that come with with moving 18 year old kids thousands of miles from their home.  It will also allow family, friends and hometown fans the ability to follow the local kids from their hometowns.

Double A teams will be for those players who graduate from A ball.  Graduation criteria will be based not only on players’ talent and performance, but also their coachability, and maturation progress.  This is when the second or third year players move from the comfort of their regional areas and move to a bigger team in different part of the country.

Foreign players will be involved in the same manner.  These players will stay in their home countries or at the very worst, a neighboring country.  Agreements with the native country can be made to facilitate entry into their pro leagues.

Putting all of the players under Major League Baseball development will keep the Single A and Double A leagues intact, could boost attendance by focusing on local players and the teaching should be uniform and based on the fundamentals.  It will also assist the players in off the field behavior and in their personal development.

And this will serve as a better feeder league for the Triple A teams.  Triple A would be an elite league and would serve for the major league teams to teach their players the way that they would like them to play in their system.  The major league roster would expand to 50, to include all the players at the major league level and on the Triple A team.  Triple A would consist mostly of drafted players from current and previous years and free agents – undrafted Double A players or players released by other teams.

The Draft

In 2009, the MLB draft consisted of 50 rounds and over 1500 players drafted.  And this draft didn’t include foreign players.  It only included high school and college players of varying levels, most of whom will not make it past the Single A level.  This is very inefficient.

With a revamp of the minor leagues, the draft then becomes easier and more efficient.  MLB can then hold a combine with star players from Double A, foreign pro leagues and the college ranks.   All the tools – running, throwing, hitting and pitching – can be evaluated using the same measuring sticks, teams can conduct interviews and prod and probe like they do in the NFL.

Teams drafting foreign players will be limited to the amount of buyout money they can spend on acquiring the foreign player.

The ordering of the draft and free agent compensation picks will remain the same.  The difference is that the draft would be limited to a predetermined number of rounds.  Trading draft picks for established players would become the norm, instead of acquiring prospects.

The Buzz for this MLB draft will become equal to or better than that generated by the NBA and the NFL.  Some Triple A affiliates will be almost as elite as some major league clubs and this would be the first step to developing premier league escalation.

All it would take is a visionary Commissioner with cajones.