Open Mic: It's Hard to Find Stars in the Baseball Draft

The NBA settled on two rounds. The NFL has seven, even though the rosters can bulge to 80 during camps. The NHL takes the same route, going seven rounds.

But not baseball. The Major League Baseball first-year player draft can extend to 50 rounds.

The baseball draft is easily the hardest to predict with regards to how talent will develop.

The system is put in place specifically to weed out those that cannot make the adjustment from college or high-school baseball to the minor-league game and then the professional game.

Players drafted have already proven that they are the best of an elite crop. It doesn’t stop there for them. Many will be assigned to short-season A ball or rookie ball in the Gulf Coast League.

Only the best of those players are moved to full-season A leagues and eventually to AA and AAA, prior to making the leap to their major-league team.

All of these teams carry 25 players at a time. The professional squad only has room for that many as well. At any given time, there could be as many as 125 players still in development, being groomed to be the next major star.

Multiply that by 30 teams and you realize that even when drafted, there is still a high percentage of players that will never see the light of day in the majors.

And the process repeats every year. Young players vying for one of 750 full-time jobs. Those that couldn’t make it in their single-A leagues, gone. Those that couldn’t quite cut it one step above, gone.

It’s cruel, yet it happens every year to many players for a variety of reasons.

Teams have millions of dollars allocated to their scouting departments in order to accurately evaluate thousands of players eligible in any given year.

They have millions more to spend on development and coaching at every level of the organization, trying to make their investment in these players worth it.

Additionally, the focus on drafts as a tool for rebuilding franchises, in the manner done by Arizona and Tampa, has caused teams to re-evaluate the selection process, their scouting departments, and the general manner in which they look at baseball.

The depth of study being done looks to minimize the number of true busts. Yet, every year, players are dropped from rosters, and teams go through the process again.

Unlike the NBA or NFL, these players are drafted strictly on their potential, and very few are ever expected to make an immediate impact to the professional organization. Even first-round selections are no sure thing.

In the first round of the 2000 draft, there were 40 selections made. Of those 40, only 12 have even appeared in a game in the major leagues. From the 2001 draft, that number goes to 16 of 44 selections.

From the 1999 draft, only 10 of 30 picks made have appeared in the pros, and just 18 of 40 in 2002. Whereas the first round, generally, is a predictor of success across many drafts, that is not the case in baseball.

The best numbers since 1999? 23 of 37 picks in the 2003 draft have appeared in the majors.

It is certainly more difficult to find suitable talents on a limited basis, such as an NFL team's need to fill holes with only seven to ten picks to do so. But the baseball draft is based on predictions of growth.

There is no way to truly tell if a player can make an adjustment to the different types of pitching when it comes from players who are just as capable. Hitting with a metal bat is very different than hitting with a wood bat.

Pitchers who dominated inferior competition in high school suddenly are facing competent hitters who know how to hit a curveball.

Baseball has so many levels in their system for these specific reasons. All the evaluation techniques in the world don’t compare to seeing live-game action. Besides, trying to fight with 150 other guys for 25 jobs is as hard as it gets.