Baseball’s annual amateur draft begins Monday. Can you feel the excitement?
To the credit of Major League Baseball, the league has attempted over the past decade to make more out of the event, bringing in some of the top picks and team legends to their television studios in Secaucus, N.J., during primetime to add to panels of prospect experts.
This is a far cry from a decade ago, when the draft was held via conference call in the middle of the afternoon. Even the nerdiest of fans were left to refresh websites to read who their team drafted, along with a couple of perfunctory lines of analysis to dream on, and if you were lucky, a few seconds of player video.
Since those days, a cottage industry has grown around the draft as the logical offshoot of the growing interest in prospect analysis. Still, baseball’s amateur draft lags far behind the other major professional sports in terms of fan impact.
There will be no fan parties filling ballrooms to react to each pick. At most, one could imagine a small gathering of friends sitting around a screen, and rather than leaping to their feet in elation or disbelief at their team’s latest selection, they’d search through the comments in mock drafts and wonder how much enthusiasm they should set aside for the name just called, and how many years before they get anywhere near a major-league stadium.
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It’s hard as a fan not to look with some jealousy at the drafts in football, hockey and basketball, where selections that are immediately franchise-altering are made regularly at top of the first round. Those players have invariably been nurtured through a semi-professional experience, either in college or junior leagues, in the case of hockey. By the time they are chosen at the draft, their skill development has already started in earnest.
With very few exceptions, most baseball draft picks will begin a long and arduous road to the big leagues, through multiple stops and levels over years. Whoever the Toronto Blue Jays select with the 11th pick in the draft may find themselves in the Dunedin complex to conclude the summer, before beginning a journey from Bluefield to Vancouver, to Lansing, to Dunedin, to New Hampshire, to Buffalo … and one day, maybe, eventually … Toronto.
This is the flipside of one of baseball’s greatest attributes: It is a sport that is incredibly difficult and impossible to master. The apprenticeship is long, and as players master the skills needed to succeed at one level, they find themselves promoted to play with competitors who will challenge them and force them to raise their game further.
It should be noted before Monday’s draft that the last first-round pick to graduate to the Blue Jays was Marcus Stroman, who was selected in 2012. All of their first rounders from 2015 onwards are still making their way through the system.
In 2014, the Blue Jays had two high first-round picks, selecting Jeff Hoffman with the ninth pick and Max Pentecost with the 11th. Five years later, Hoffman, the key piece in the Troy Tulowitzki deal, is sporting ERAs above seven in both the majors and minors this season, while Pentecost chose to leave the game after spring training.
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The Anthopoulos era Jays made a habit of stockpiling high draft picks, and in the early days of the blogosphere, someone may have figured that the 2007 draft would be essential to determining the future success of the franchise.
That year, Toronto first chose Kevin Ahrens, who never made it past double-A. The Blue Jays then selected J.P. Arencibia, who contributed for a few years and posted two wins above replacement, but was gone by the time the team was successful again. Justin Jackson spent nine seasons in the minors, toiling first as a shortstop and then as a relief pitcher before calling it a career. Trystan Magnuson helped bring Rajai Davis to Toronto in a trade, pitching nine games for the Oakland Athletics.
With five of the first 56 picks, the most notable selection that year turned out to be Brett Cecil, who has posted 6.6 wins per Baseball Reference, and was a key contributor – not to mention heartbreaking absence – on the 2015 Blue Jays.
In a season where optimism is in short supply, and a little hope would go a long way it would be nice to envision the Blue Jays’ selection Monday being a part of the next contending team. But given the history, one shouldn’t begin ordering jerseys with their names anytime soon.
But to end on a hopeful note, baseball is seeing many more young players emerge into the big leagues at 19 and 20 years of age. With greater development resources at their own disposal, maybe some of these players will truncate their minor-league schooling by several years.
And if we Jays fans are lucky, maybe they find one of the ones who change the game for the better.
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