Ten, fifteen years ago, some of my fellow knights of the keyboard would annually agitate for Major League Baseball to work harder at promoting itself ... by televising the amateur draft.
I would suggest, in my patented and gentle fashion, that maybe this wasn't the greatest idea. Because a) drafts are generally sorta boring, and b) the baseball draft would be especially uninteresting, because of the sport's very nature.
In 2007, those knights finally got their wish. The result? I think Jeff Passan summed things up nicely a few years ago:
Baseball, of course, wants to have its alcohol and drink it, too, by televising a draft that is hours of soul-numbing viewing. The entertainment quotient is restricted to prospect hounds and those who tune in to see Bud Selig pronounce the Dodgers' hometown as Los Angeleeze.
(Count me among the latter. It's awesome.)
So without the awesomeness of the Selig Experience, what's left?
Well, I don't want to say that all that's left is soul-numbing, because the folks who organize and televise and analyze the draft are good folks, doing their damnedest to make the proceedings as entertaining as possible.
But it's not, and never will be, any sort of promotional tool. Passan actually suggested it could be, if MLB promoted amateur baseball before the draft. I'm not buying it. I think MLB could show high-school and college games 24/7 for two weeks before the draft, and it wouldn't matter. For one thing, almost nobody would be watching. For another, you're still going to be watching mostly players who won't even be drafted, let alone drafted in the first couple of rounds.
The math just doesn't work. Hasn't worked, isn't working, won't work.
Here are the last six No. 5 picks in the draft; the last six amateur players who were deemed the fifth-best draftable players in Canada or the United States (including Puerto Rico). Ready?
Nick Gordon
Clint Frazier
Kyle Zimmer
Bubba Starling
Drew Pomeranz
Matt Hobgood
I'm going to guess that many of you have heard of one, maybe two of these guys. The over/under's probably 2½. Only Pomeranz has reached the majors, and he's 11-21, been traded twice.
The other guys might still make it, too! But a) the odds are against them becoming stars, and b) some of them won't make it at all.
Just out of curiosity, I looked at the last six No. 5 picks in the NBA draft:
Dante Exum
Alex Len
Thomas Robinson
Jonas Valanciunas
DeMarcus Cousins
Jonny Flynn
All six of those guys have played in the NBA. Flynn's a bust and Exum struggled this season as a 19-year-old rookie. But all six were immediately relevant to their teams and their teams' fans, one way or another.
I didn't look at the NFL -- I mean, have you looked at the NFL lately? -- but I'll bet the story would be much the same.
It's not surprising when general sports columnists who don't really love baseball, might not even care about baseball at all, demand that baseball become more like football and basketball. But it's mildly upsetting to me when my fellow baseball knights do the same thing.
It's baseball, and it's different. We're better off celebrating this fact than railing against it.
