The first round of the MLB draft was last night, and the Giants took Patrick Bailey, a catcher from North Carolina State. So the countdown starts now: In 5 years we’ll probably know whether this was a good pick or not.
In recent years, baseball has been trying to make its draft more of An Event, like the NBA and NFL drafts are Events. They have not succeeded, and there are a few reasons for that:
The draft is boring. All drafts are boring. Have you ever watched the NFL Draft? It’s a terrible television show. Just absolutely godawful. It’s boring and way too long, and worst of all, it’s just showy anti-labor bureaucracy. “Player A goes here, to the worst team, then Player B goes to the second worst team, then…” It is an inherently dull exercise.
The gratification is extremely delayed. At least in the NFL and NBA drafts, you have a good sense that every first rounder will be in the league in six months, and a good percentage of them will be stars. In the MLB draft, it’ll be years before any of them make it and when they do, most of them will just be okay. This significantly reduces the drama. Will the Giants look like goofy idiots for passing on Tyler Soderstrom? We’ll let you know in 2026!
Baseball just isn’t that cool. Baseball isn’t ubiquitous in pop culture like basketball or football. And it’s a misunderstanding of the popularity of their drafts to ask why baseball’s isn’t as popular. People don’t watch the NFL Draft because they want to see a draft. They watch it because they want to see more NFL. That’s why they watch the Combine, which is literally the worst TV show imaginable. People like this thing, and the league is giving them more of it, so they’re consuming it. The demand comes from the inherent popularity of the sport. Baseball, as a sport, is squeezing its inherent popularity for every dollar it’s got, which is working, but is also making the sport less popular.
But a draft doesn’t have to be popular. A draft is just business; in the coldest, most inhuman terms, a draft is just how an organization (MLB) allocates resources (players) to its constituent parts (the teams). It sounds dull when I describe it like that because it is dull. Like a city council meeting, it’s important, but that doesn’t mean it’s fun to watch it happen. The important thing is that if a draft is the system of bringing talent into the game, the draft does its job of bringing talent into the game.
The 2020 MLB Draft will not do its job of bringing talent into the game.
In response to the pandemic, baseball cut it draft from 40 rounds to 5, and decreed that undrafted players could sign for a maximum of $20,000. So 6th round talents, who in normal years would receive a bonus of a couple hundred thousand dollars, now have to settle for a tenth of that. The classic baseball strategy where teams cast a wide net and then develop the most interesting players is gone. Paul Goldschmidt (8th round) and Albert Pujols (12th round) would go undrafted this year. Just restricting ourselves to 2019 All-Star starters, JD Martinez (20th round) and Michael Brantley (7th round) would not have heard their names called.
Bullpens are full of guys like Kirby Yates (26th round) or Brandon Woodruff (11th round) or Will Smith (7th round) or Ryan Pressly (11th round). Well, not from this draft they’re not.
If that were the extent of the problem — some guys not getting drafted this year — that would be bad enough. But there’s a deeper meaning to this, which is this sport will fuck you over. If you’re an amateur athlete, how do you not look at the owners being absolute cheapskates here, and add that to owners being absolute cheapskates when it comes to minor league salaries, and when it comes to crying poverty to the press, and think, hey, this maybe isn’t the sport for me.
And if you’re a poor amateur athlete, someone for whom sports is your best shot at moving up in the world, how could you ever think that baseball is the right path for you? You make no money for years trying to make it, and even if you do make it, teams fudge your service time to pay you less, and go out of their way to avoid paying you what you’re worth until you hit free agency and they can claim you’re not worth anything anymore. It’s just about impossible to win that game, so why even try? Why not throw on some pads, catch some passes, and get knocked to the ground? It’s just a more rational option.
Baseball’s draft is not inherently interesting, but it is overall good for the sport to allow bad teams to acquire the best players in an attempt to improve themselves into watchability (all drafts are anti-labor, of course, since they do not allow players the freedom to choose where they will sign, but that’s a whole other topic). As they’re doing in so many areas, baseball’s owners are throwing away that long-term good in favor of the short-term good of not paying so many bonuses to people.
It’s bad business. It’s bad optics. They’ll get away with it, like owners get away with everything in America, but it’s a bad idea executed badly. Years down the line, baseball will regret this decision. For today, though, it saves them money. Champagne is popped. The owners win again.