Major League Baseball Draft

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The First-Year Player Draft is Major League Baseball's primary mechanism for assigning amateur players to its teams. The draft order is determined based on the previous season's standings, with the team possessing the worst record receiving the first pick. In addition, teams which lost free agents in the previous off-season may be awarded "compensatory" picks. The first amateur draft was held in 1965. Unlike most sports drafts, the First-Year Player Draft is held mid-season, in June.

Contents 1 Before the draft 2 The draft 2.1 Economic impact 3 Procedures and rules 3.1 Eligibility 3.2 Negotiating rights 3.3 Compensatory picks 4 See also 5 References

[edit] Before the draft

Major League Baseball used a draft to assign minor league players to teams since 1921.^[1][2] In 1936, the National Football League held the first amateur draft in professional sports.^[3] A decade later, National Basketball Association instituted a similar method of player distribution. However, the player draft was not uncontroversial. Congressman Emanuel Celler questioned the legality of drafts during a series of hearings on the business practice of professional sports leagues in the 1950s.^[4] Successful clubs saw the draft as anti-competitive. Yankees executive Johnny Johnson equated it with communism.^[5] At the same time, Pulitzer Prize winning sports columnist Arthur Daley called the system to a "slave market."^[6]

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.^[7]

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.^[8] 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 The controversial legislation was repealed twice, only to be re-instituted.^[9]

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.^[6] 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.^[10]

Major League clubs voted on the draft during the 1964 Winter Meetings. Four teams -- the Yankees, 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.^[11]

[edit] The draft

Major League Baseball's first amateur draft was held in June of 1965. Teams chose players in reverse order of the previous season's standings, with picks alternating between the National and American League.^[12] With the first pick, the Kansas City Athletics took Rick Monday, an outfielder for 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. A second draft was held in January for high school and college players who graduated in the winter. Finally, there was a draft in August for players who participated in amateur summer leagues.^[12] The August draft was eliminated after only two years, while the January draft lasted until 1986.^[13]

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.^[14] However, the college players who were drafted outperformed their high school counterparts by what statistician Bill James called "a laughably huge margin."^[15] In 1978, a majority of draftees had played college baseball, and by 2002, the number rose above sixty percent.^[14] 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.^[16]

[edit] 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 $205,000. 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.^[17]

Player salaries continued to to escalate through the 1980s. In 1986, Bo Jackson became the first draftee to sign a total contract (signing bonus and salary) worth over one-million dollars.^[18] 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 seven-million dollar contract to play football for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.^[19]

High school players possessed additional leverage, as they had the option of attending junior college and re-entering the draft the next year. Agent Scott Boras routinely exploited this loophole to increase the contracts of his clients. In 1990, Boras client Todd Van Poppel signed a $1.2 million contract with Oakland Athletics, after committing to play for the University of Texas. The following year, Boras negotiated a $1.55 million contract for Yankees first round pick Brien Taylor, who had said he would attend junior college if he didn't receive a contract equal to Van Poppel's.^[20]

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.^[21]An arbitrator ultimately decided that any change to draft articles must be negotiated with the Players Association.^[22]

[edit] Procedures and rules

[edit] Eligibility

In order to be drafted a player must fit the following criteria:

• He is a resident of the United States, Canada, or a U.S. territory such as Puerto Rico. Players from other countries are not subject to the draft, and can be signed by any team.
• He has never before been signed a Major or minor league contract.
• High school players are eligible only after graduation, and if they have not attended college.
• Players at four-year colleges are eligible after completing their junior years, or after their twenty-first birthdays.
• Junior and community college players are eligible to be drafted at any time.

[edit] Negotiating rights

A team retains the rights to sign a selected player for one week prior to the next draft, or until the player enters, or returns to, a four-year college on a full-time basis. A selected player who enters a junior college cannot be signed until the conclusion of the school's baseball season. A player who is drafted and does not sign with the club that selected him may be drafted again at a future year's draft, so long as the player is eligible for that year's draft. A club may not select a player again in a subsequent year, unless the player has consented to the re-selection.

A player who is eligible to be selected and is passed over by every club becomes a free agent and may sign with any club, up until one week before the next draft, or until the player enters, or returns to, a four-year college full-time or enters, or returns to, a junior college. In the one-week period before any draft, which is called the "closed period", the general rule is that no club may sign a new player.

[edit] Compensatory picks

Unlike other sports drafts, picks are made extremely quickly; each team must select a player or pass on him within two minutes when it is their turn. Baseball draft picks cannot be traded; however, if a first- or second-round draft pick signs with a different team as a free agent, and the former team had offered the player arbitration, then the player's former team is entitled to a draft pick during the "sandwich round" of next year's draft. A sandwich round, also known as a compensatory round, occurs after the first, but before the second round of the draft. For instance, if a team has the No. 5 pick in the first round but fails to sign the player, then the team receives a pick in the first sandwich round of the following year. The order of picks in a sandwich round is determined by inverse standings.

[edit] See also

• 2005 Major League Baseball Draft
• 2006 Major League Baseball Draft
• List of MLB first overall draft choices
• Rule 5 Draft

[edit] References