November 10, 2009

Fixing the Draft

I have to disagree with Doug Melvin:

“The draft has to be fixed,” Brewers GM Doug Melvin said, citing how teams willing to spend the most money signing players wind up with the best players. “… No other sport has a draft manipulated by agents, where decisions are made on signabilty, not the ability of the player.”

I’m sorry, didn’t Eli Manning manipulate the NFL draft to end up with the Giants? If baseball allowed draft picks to be traded, I think most of these problems would disappear. How many teams would have been willing to trade the Nationals four players to get a shot at Strasburg?

MLB should lift the ban on trading draft picks at a minimum. I still think they should abolish the draft altogether, but that’s not going to sell.

3 thoughts on “Fixing the Draft

  1. Ron

    Why would you want the draft abolished? Would you replace it with something else? I am new to this site. so I don’t know if you have answered these questions before. It seems to me if the draft was abolished the big money teams would get all the talent and teams like the Twins and Athletics would be farther away from the competition

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  2. David Pinto Post author

    @Ron: The big money teams don’t seem to get all the best players from Latin America, where players are not subject to the draft. I don’t see why it would happen if you put US players on the same footing as international players. My guess is the increased competition would lower the price for amateur free agents across the board, making good players more affordable to small market teams. Big market teams already pick up players who fall through the draft due to signability issues, so rich teams getting the good players is already happening.

    What abolishing the draft might due is allow a small market team to sign both the 14th and 15th best players in what would be the draft for less than they might pay for the number one. They might be able to quickly build up to a good, low cost team, then have money to spend on a quality free agent to put them over the top. It just gives teams more options.

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  3. ShoelesJoe

    The problem with your logic is that while a poor team may sign more players for cheaper (I don’t buy that’s what would happen, but let’s say it did) the chances of those second tier players fulfilling expectations is likely to be much less than the chance of premium players doing the same. So even in a quantity over quality environment the poorer teams would get screwed. The rich teams would not only get the better players, they’d get the surer players.

    I think a non-draft situation would see the top 40-50 picks going to the top 5-10 richest teams, the same way premium foreign players almost always go to the Red Sox and Yankees. Sorry, the game needs to go the other way and make the draft world wide. Nobody gets to come into the game as the prize in a bidding war. Not from Cuba, Japan, or anywhere else.

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