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Reliever Dan Naulty on suicide and steroids

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by gingerbread, Dec 23, 2007.

  1. HoopsMcCann

    HoopsMcCann Active Member

    it's gotta be tough to keep all those multiple personalities straight. seems like too much work for me

    thanks for the link gingerbread
     
  2. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    Nice piece. Naulty was a fourteenth round pick. The fact that he actually played in the Big Leagues is a miracle. The fact he wasn't on the roster is, well, kinda irrelevant to the story.
     
  3. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    A miricle is 62nd round pick Mike Piazza making it to MLB. A 14th round pick as a miricle ? Not really.
     
  4. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    Miracle, Boom. Miracle.

    Mike Piazza's selection represents divine intervention.

    Just out of curiosity, when did MLB go to fifty rounds in the draft?

    I'd be interested in knowing how many players in any given draft year---let's say 1999 --played at least one game in MLB? Not a huge percentage, I'd bet.

    And I'd still say that a player drafted in the fourteenth round has a pretty slim chance of making it.

    Look at the hockey draft. Used to be 9 rounds, now it's 7 and after about the 10th pick of the first round, it's all a crap shoot.
     
  5. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    jr - you cannot equate the baseball draft to any other. The probability of making it are pretty low in every round. In 2007 draft was 60 rounds so 14 th round pick is a pretty high draft pick reletively speaking.
     
  6. HoopsMcCann

    HoopsMcCann Active Member

    yeah, he's right... never surprised by a pick in the top 20 rounds making the majors. it happens. baseball is different than any other draft. very, very different.
     
  7. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    So if there are what, 600 players drafted in the first twenty rounds, what percentage actually make it?

    I mean at what point does a draft choice become just filling in a name?

    And Hoops, in your opinion, what separates a first round pick from a fourteenth?

    I know in hockey that there's not much difference between a second round pick and a seventh.
     
  8. BYH

    BYH Active Member

    It is a fascinating thing. Fifty picks (roughly, you might get a few more or a few less) and if you land two established big leaguers, it's a very good draft.

    I haven't done the statistical research, but JR is right in that once you get out of the first few rounds, players are basically interchangable...sure, a team will view a 14th-rounder better than it views a 47th-rounder, but the big money is in the first few rounds. After that, the team has minimal investment in a player.

    That's why you see nobodies throwing many more innings than a stud draftee, or why a kid from the 14th round goes straight to full-season ball. The team may as well see what it's got. And if he implodes? Oh well. A few grand down the drain, as opposed to the financial and symbolic hit a team will take if a top pick bites it.

    BTW, the draft was capped at 50 rounds in 1998, I believe, which means no one will ever match Travis Phelps, who made it to the big leagues after being drafted in the 89th round in 1996.
     
  9. buckweaver

    buckweaver Active Member

    I think anybody from the top 10 rounds stands a decent chance to make the majors. And by chance, I mean 20%, maybe less.

    Consider: 29 of the 52 (including supplemental) first-round draft picks in 1997 have made an appearance in the majors. That's first round. I think I read that 5 of the 30 sixth-round picks that year have played an inning in the bigs.

    19 of the 30 first-rounders from the 2001 draft have made the majors. Part of that is teams getting smarter, not drafting so many high school kids so high. Gavin Floyd (No. 4) and the forgettable Johnathan Griffin (No. 8) were the only two HS draft picks in the top 10 that time.

    Can't really be expressed enough: Baseball's draft, and the development of baseball players, is different from any other sport.
     
  10. HoopsMcCann

    HoopsMcCann Active Member

    buck beat me to it -- the difference in baseball than any of the other sports is that the first round is no guarantee of playing at the highest level. you could consider it pretty remarkable when any player makes it to the majors (and also remember, unlike the other sports, a large number of players -- and some of the best -- are never drafted, instead signed from foreign lands, skewing the percentages of players who are drafted making the majors). also, in baseball, more than any other place, you have people taking chances on players -- drafting a guy in the 14th round that most people don't think are going to sign and then giving them top 5 round money to sign. and all sorts of other oddities in drafting
     
  11. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    jr jr clearly not the baseball draft czar.
     
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