Major League Baseball Draft

The first-year player draft is the primary mechanism of Major League Baseball (MLB) for assigning amateur baseball players from high schools, colleges, and other amateur baseball clubs to its teams. The draft order is determined based on a lottery where the teams who did not make the postseason in the past year participate in a state-lottery style process to determine the first six picks, starting in 2023. The team possessing the worst record receives the best odds of receiving the first pick. Until 2022, it was determined by the previous season's standings, with the worst team selecting first.

The first amateur draft was held in 1965. Unlike most sports drafts, the first-year player draft is held mid-season, in July since 2021. Another distinguishing feature of this draft in comparison with those of other North American major professional sports leagues is its sheer size: under the current collective bargaining agreement, the draft lasts until 20 rounds in addition to, since 2021, compensatory picks. It lasted up to 40 rounds until 2019. In contrast, the NFL Draft lasts for only seven rounds (260 selections), the NHL Entry Draft lasts for seven rounds (224 selections), the MLS SuperDraft lasts for only three rounds (75 selections), and the NBA draft lasts for only two rounds (60 selections).

On March 26, 2020, MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) reached a deal that included the option to shorten that year's draft to five rounds, and halve the 2021 draft to 20 rounds. On March 10, 2022, after the two entities came to agree on a new collective bargaining agreement, the first round order will be based firstly on a lottery participated by 18 non-postseason teams that determines the first six picks in the draft, starting with the 2023 edition, and secondly on the results of playoff teams. Subsequent rounds will be determined by the preceding season's win-loss records for the first 18 selections in each round, followed also by playoff finishes.

Before the draft

Major League Baseball has used a draft to assign minor league players to teams since 1921. In 1936, the National Football League held the first amateur draft in professional sports. A decade later, the National Basketball Association instituted a similar method of player distribution. However, the player draft was controversial. Congressman Emanuel Celler questioned the legality of drafts during a series of hearings on the business practice of professional sports leagues in the 1950s. Successful clubs saw the draft as anti-competitive. Yankees executive Johnny Johnson equated it with communism. At the same time, Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist Arthur Daley compared the system to a "slave market."

Prior to the implementation of the first-year player draft, amateurs were free to sign with any Major League team that offered them a contract. As a result, wealthier teams such as the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals were able to stockpile young talent, while poorer clubs were left to sign less desirable prospects.

In 1947, Major League Baseball implemented the bonus rule, a restriction aimed at reducing player salaries, as well as keeping wealthier teams from monopolizing the player market. In its most restrictive form, it forbade any team which gave an amateur a signing bonus of more than $4,000 from assigning that player to a minor league affiliate for two seasons. If the player was removed from the major league roster, he became a free agent. The controversial rule was repealed twice, only to be re-instituted.

The bonus rule was largely ineffective. There were accusations that teams were signing players to smaller bonuses, only to supplement them with under-the-table payments. In one famous incident, the Kansas City Athletics signed Clete Boyer, kept him on their roster for two years, then traded him to the Yankees just as he became eligible to be sent to the minor leagues. Other clubs accused the Yankees of using the Athletics as a de facto farm team, and the A's later admitted to signing Boyer on their behalf. Finally, it was the bidding war for Rick Reichardt, who signed with the Los Angeles Angels for the then outrageous bonus of $200,000, (about $1.8 million today) that led to the implementation of the draft.

Major League clubs voted on the draft during the 1964 Winter Meetings. Four teams—the New York Yankees, St. Louis Cardinals, Los Angeles Dodgers, and New York Mets—attempted to defeat the proposal, but they failed to convince a majority of teams, and in the end only the Cardinals voted against it.

The draft

MLB player transactions are governed by ''The Official Professional Baseball Rules Book'', within which, Rule 4 governs the "First-Year Player Draft". Due to its place in the rules book, MLB's amateur draft is sometimes referred to as the "Rule 4 draft"; there is also a distinctly different Rule 5 draft.

Major League Baseball's first amateur draft was held on June 8–9, 1965, in New York City. Teams chose players in reverse order of the previous season's standings, with picks alternating between the National and American Leagues. With the first pick, the Kansas City Athletics took Rick Monday, an outfielder from Arizona State University.

Originally, three separate drafts were held each year. The June draft, which was by far the largest, involved new high school graduates, as well as college seniors who had just finished their seasons. Another draft was held in January, which typically involved high school players who graduated in the winter, junior college players, and players who had dropped out of four-year colleges. Junior college players were required to wait until their current season was completed before they could sign. Finally, there was a draft in August for players who participated in amateur summer leagues. The August draft was eliminated after only two years, while the January draft lasted until 1986.

Influence of the draftee's age

Early on, the majority of players drafted came directly from high school. Between 1967 and 1971, only seven college players were chosen in the first round of the June draft. However, the college players who were drafted outperformed their high school counterparts by what statistician Bill James called "a laughably huge margin."
By 1978, a majority of draftees had played college baseball, and by 2002, the number rose above sixty percent. While the number of high school players drafted has dropped, those picked have been more successful than their predecessors. In a study of drafts from 1984 to 1999, ''Baseball Prospectus'' writer Rany Jazayerli concluded that, by the 1990s, the gap in production between the two groups had nearly disappeared. In October 2011, Jazayerli presented another research study which included an analysis of those players drafted since 1965, but instead of breaking them into college or high school draftees, he segregated them by their age on draft day. In the study published in ''Baseball Prospectus'', which included a follow up article of the financial benefits, Jazayerli concluded that the very young players return more value than expected by their draft slots. In Jazayerli's study he looked at the statistics and broke draftees into five distinctive groups based on their age and being drafted in the early rounds. Jazayerli's defined a “very young” player as those who are younger than 17 years and 296 days on draft day. Since the inception of the draft, the youngest player ever drafted in an early round is Alfredo Escalera. Escalera was drafted by the Kansas City Royals in the eighth round of the 2012 draft at 17 years and 114 days. Jazayerli's study does not clearly demonstrate the influence of the player's age when drafted in a late round.

Economic impact

Initially, the draft succeeded in reducing the value of signing bonuses. In 1964, a year before the first draft, University of Wisconsin outfielder Rick Reichardt was given a record bonus of $200,000 ( $1,798,722 today) by the Los Angeles Angels. Without competition from other clubs, the Athletics were able to sign Rick Monday for a bonus of only $104,000. It would take until 1979 for a drafted player to receive a bonus higher than Reichardt's.

Player salaries continued to escalate through the 1980s. In 1986, Bo Jackson became the first draftee to sign a total contract (signing bonus and salary) worth over $1 million ($ today). Jackson, a Heisman Trophy-winning football player for Auburn University, was also the first overall choice in the National Football League draft, and was offered a $7 million ($ today) contract to play football for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

High school players possessed additional leverage, as they had the option of attending college and re-entering the draft the next year. Agent Scott Boras routinely exploited this advantage to increase the contracts of his clients. In 1990, Boras client Todd Van Poppel signed a $1.2 million ($ today) contract with Oakland Athletics, after committing to play for the University of Texas. The following year, Boras negotiated a $1.55 million ($ today) contract for Yankees first round pick Brien Taylor, who had said he would attend junior college if he did not receive a contract equal to Van Poppel's. By June 2009, a figure as high as $15 million was floated for collegian pitcher Stephen Strasburg.

Increasingly, teams drafted based on whether or not a player was likely to sign for a particular amount of money, rather than on his talent. This became known as a "signability pick". Before the 1992 draft, team owners unilaterally decided to extend the period of time a team retained negotiating rights to a player from one year to five. In effect, the rule prohibited a high school draftee from attending college and re-entering the draft after his junior or senior seasons. The Major League Baseball Players Association filed a legal challenge, but Major League Baseball argued that, since the Players Association did not represent amateur players, it was not necessary for the union to agree to the change. An arbitrator ultimately decided that any change to draft articles must be negotiated with the Players Association.

Media exposure

The first-year player draft has historically had far less media exposure than its counterparts in the other leagues for three primary reasons:
* High school and college baseball, the primary sources of MLB draftees, are not nearly as popular as college football, college basketball, and, in Canada and certain parts of the U.S., college and junior hockey. Consequently, most prospective top draft picks were unknown to the casual sports observer at the time of their draft. However, this is slowly changing: NCAA baseball has enjoyed a spike in popularity in the 2000s and top collegiate baseball players have enjoyed greater media exposure, though still far below that of their basketball and football counterparts.
* Unlike top draft picks in the NHL, NBA, and NFL, all of whom are expected to make immediate impacts, top MLB draftees are nearly always assigned to the minor leagues for several years to hone their skills, usually at low levels (Rookie or Class A) initially. Due to this, fans cannot see the newly drafted players perform immediately, causing them to forget or lose interest in them. The entire 2007 first round (64 players) totaled one inning of major league playing time as of the end of the 2008 season; as of the 2009 season, the vast majority of 2008 first-rounders were still assigned to minor league organizations. In contrast, every first-round pick in the 2008 NFL draft had played in the league by the end of the 2008 season.
*While many NHL, NBA, and NFL draftees will eventually reach their respective leagues, the vast majority of players selected in the first-year player draft will never play in a single MLB game, including many first-rounders. For example, only 31 of 52 first-round draft picks in the 1997 draft eventually made a big-league appearance, and only 19 of those 31 appeared in more than 100 games as of 2021. In 1997's sixth round, only five of the 30 players selected eventually made a big league appearance, all of which pitchers, and only two of those five (Tim Hudson and Matt Wise) pitched more than 40 innings in the majors. Further illustrating the unpredictability of the draft's middle and later rounds, none of the 30 players selected in the 18th round ever reached the major leagues, but the 19th round eventually produced an all-star and World Series MVP, David Eckstein. Even stranger, Hall of Famer Mike Piazza was selected in the 62nd round, 1390th overall, of the 1988 draft.

The 2007 draft was the first to be televised live, on June 7, 2007. The draft coverage took place at Disney's Wide World of Sports Complex at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Florida. Since the 2009 draft, the first round of the draft has been broadcast annually on MLB Network live and in prime time from its studios in Secaucus, New Jersey

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