Why is there a Baseball draft?

Fat pussy (or possy, think that was the start of Steinbrenner losing it) Toad.

 

I just remember always laughing whenever I think of the final episode of Seinfeld, when Steinbrenner is on the witness stand, and George's father yells out from the gallery: "How could you give Hideki Irabu $12 million?"

 

I would say Alexandre Daigle is arguably the worst.

 

If you want to argue the reasons why owners want a draft, whether it is competitive balance or to save money (It is both), then I can see that as a reasonable argument.

To say that a draft has no impact at all on competitive balance is ridiculous. It's a nice bit of bullshit you can throw out there to say there is no evidence. Of course there is no evidence. The drafts have been around too long to know how it would go otherwise.

 

Someone mentioned it earlier:



He wasn't Mantle, and he had poor penmanship, too.

 

When a team loses a player in free agency, that team can get a compensatory draft pick. That is how the union has successfully claimed any changes to the draft must be collectively bargained. If the owners agreed to get rid of compensatory draft picks, the union would be hard-pressed to persuade an arbitrator why it should have any say over the selection of players it does not represent.

 

"To say that a draft has no impact at all on competitive balance is ridiculous. It's a nice bit of bullshit you can throw out there to say there is no evidence. Of course there is no evidence. The drafts have been around too long to know how it would go otherwise."

This really confuses me. How can there be "no evidence" if the draft has been around so long? The draft dates to the mid-60s. At least a decade went by before free agency bloomed. Surely one could draw some valid inferences regarding competitive balance pre- and post-draft, even with controls for the different competitive regimes.

 

It wasn't just that before the draft was instituted they were spending money. The clubs were paying exorbitant sums to young, unproven players very few of whom ever became good major leaguers, and many did not go on to significant careers at all. The clubs handicapped their own short-term prospects and the long-term prospects of the players by accepting the requirement that the players remain on the 25-man roster for two years. They created obvious issues of fairness and morale on their major league rosters by paying far more money to people too young to drink or vote than they were giving to their own proven veteran players.

This was a bizarre state of affairs, but by no means unique. Essentially similar situations have arisen throughout baseball history. The reserve clause has always worked to create an artificial scarcity of talent and thereby dramatically improve the bargaining position of anybody with talent to sell for cash, whether the seller is a club owner or a player fortunate enough to be free of the reserve. If an entire class of talent is put up for sale on the open market regularly in this way, the price of talent will rise to a level the clubs consider unacceptable, and something will be done to regulate competition in that particular area. In the early 1960's, that meant an amateur draft.

Now we live in a different world, where the talent market is still far from completely open but much more fluid than was the case when half a century ago. So I think it's interesting to speculate and not entirely obvious what would happen if we returned to an open market for amateur players.

 

The first NFL draft was held in 1936. How useful exactly would it be to compare the NFL in 1935 to 2010?

 

It wouldn't be very useful. That's not the point. The NFL's competitive regime -- i.e., the rules of the game, the predominant style of play, etc. -- has varied wildly over that period. Surely you would concede that the NFL of 1935, as an athletic contest, bears no resemblance to that of 2010 (or 1980 for that matter). Surely you would also concede that professional baseball, as an athletic contest, differed very little in the 10 years pre- and post-draft.

 

That was my point. You were the one who said comparisons could be made between the time before the draft and after. I mentioned when the NFL draft started to show how impossible that is. There is no evidence because there is nothing to compare to. We only know what has happened with the draft in place.

 

Oh, OK ... sorry, you misunderstood my post (or my post was poorly written and misled you). I disagree with you. I don't think it impossible to make a reasonably valid pre- and post-draft comparison ... in baseball. I think it would be all but impossible in football, because of the degree of change over time. I think it would be possible in baseball -- at least moreso than in football -- because of the relative lack of changes in the way the game is played.

Now, the comparison would not be iron-clad. There would be the not-trivial matter of operationalizing the "competitive balance" construct. How one does that likely would strongly influence the inferences that could reasonably be drawn from the comparison. As in, "well, of course, if you're going to define competitive balance that way ..."

Maybe that's why the debate's interesting to me. Simply thinking through it is fun.