MLB Competitive Balance Lottery 2012: Bud Selig's Revision Comical and Fruitless

An extra draft pick won't all of a sudden make you World Series champions.

Add in the fact that nine different teams have won the World Series in the past 11 years—some with smaller budgets—and you have a whole lot of hoopla for nothing with the first MLB Competitive Balance Lottery set to kick off on Monday.

Jonathan Mayo of MLB.com wrote in November about the new lottery:

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The 10 smallest-market teams and the 10 lowest-revenue teams will be placed in the lottery to have a chance to win one of six extra picks in 2013. This doesn't mean there will be 20 teams in the lottery. There will be plenty of crossover, with the expectation of having 13 teams involved.

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According to Mayo, those teams could include the Arizona Diamondbacks, Baltimore Orioles, Cleveland Indians, Cincinnati Reds, Colorado Rockies, Kansas City Royals, Miami Marlins, Milwaukee Brewers, Oakland Athletics, Pittsburgh Pirates, San Diego Padres, St. Louis Cardinals and Tampa Bay Rays.

If you are surprised by some of these names, you should be. Seven of these 13 teams have winning records in 2012, and the Miami Marlins and defending champion St. Louis Cardinals rank seventh and ninth in MLB payroll, respectively, per USA Today.

The fact of the matter is, there is no method to Bud Selig's madness; it is just as unpredictable as baseball itself.

Show of hands, who had the 2010 San Francisco Giants winning it all (Giants fans, put your hands down)?

Weren't the Texas Rangers favored to win the 2011 World Series?

Get my point?

This is trying to fix a problem that isn't there, and instead making things more complicated. One draft pick will not boost small-market and low-revenue teams to the point where they are the New York Yankees, just as much as one big free-agent signing won't make the Yankees world champions. And, given the Cardinals are in the mix for an extra draft pick, this doesn't make much sense, either.

A commissioner's job is to make things less complicated and more practical, not the other way around.

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