Not Quite Feeling The Draft

Nice article from SI.com's Joe Posnanski about the fool's gold in the Major League Baseball draft. This draft had a little more attention than it had in past years, largely due to the emergence of pitching phenom Stephen Strasburg and live television coverage for the first time.

No necessarily trying to be a spoilsport, Posnanski correctly points out that while most professional drafts showcase a great of players that never make the major leagues, the percentage is even worse in baseball. In fact, the players that eventually become stars are from all rounds. Given a 50-round draft with 30+ teams per round, the large miss rate, plus the inability to trade draft picks - there's little gravitas or suspense. Posnanski uses the good example of Paul Konerko to illustrate what success from the draft looks like. If you were excited about Konerko, you had to wait eight years and two teams later to have your hopes fulfilled.

As for me, I think there's some hope for the MLB draft to be at least a little more entertaining. In addition to allowing teams to trade draft picks, I think you need to have some clever commentators who can recycle hackneyed catchphrases about prospects and have columnists like ESPN.com's Bill Simmons make snarky jokes around double entendres with sexual undertones. For example commentator Hubie Brown is famous for his common talent assessment phrases "incredible upside", "great athleticism", "plays above the rim" and "long" (the phrase that makes Bill Simmons giggle like a 6-year-old). 

The baseball analogy would be Peter Gammons saying something along the lines of, "Dustin Ackley has great makeup and field instincts. As a batter, he has great plate coverage and he can really stroke it." (insert Bill Simmons chuckling)

As for the Yankees, they picked up Slade Heathcott with their first pick of the draft. I'll look forward to him contributing eight years and two teams from now. And if he bucks the odds and becomes the next Josh Hamilton, then I'll be pleasantly surprised.