Why is there a Baseball draft?

The draft does have less of an impact in baseball because player development is more difficult to predict, partially because you have high school players in the mix.

That said, while the game on the field has not changed that much, MLB is still very different from what it was in 1965 in terms of scouting and player procurement. There is some evidence, but it still would not make for a valid comparison to apply to the current status of the sport.

 

Explain why it is different

 

Seriously?

 

I think he was wanting follow-up/clarification on this statement: "MLB is still very different from what it was in 1965 in terms of scouting and player procurement."

And just to clarify, I never suggested comparing TODAY to the years before the draft. I suggested that a comparison of the years IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING the institution of the draft to those years IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING it might be reasonably valid. The devil would be in the details, though.

 

And I'm saying that you have to be able to make some comparison to the game today for that data to be useful.

I know exactly what he was asking for. My response still stands.

 

If you call that a response, then obviously I was mistaken. I was under the impression we were engaged in something of a debate. I assumed we had different perspectives but that we were discussing these in good faith. Now I see we were just playing verbal ping pong. My bad.

 

Some questions are ridiculous enough to deserve the snark, but fine. Here are just a few ways it is different.

Scouting is far more sophisticated than it was 45 years ago. Big-time talents are less likely to fall through the cracks, thus more likely to go to the teams with the big budgets.

Regarding player procurement, the gap between the haves and have-nots is so much wider now it isn't even funny. Even comparisons to 20 years ago don't hold up well, much less 45.

That is just a very simplistic view of the changes. The game on the field may not have changed that much, but the way players are brought into it is far too different for that kind of data to be of value.

 

I can see you've met our friend, OOP, the only person in the world who can argue with a straight face that a sample size is too big to draw conclusions.

 

Laughing ... and reminded of the old bromide "Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?"

 

Now who is playing verbal ping-pong? You ask for a serious answer and when I give you one, you ignore it so you can giggle at cranberry's latest misrepresentation. I guess you don't have an answer for me. No surprise there.

cranberry, where did argue that a sample size is too big to draw conclusions? That is absolutely not the same thing as saying that data is too old and things have changed to much for it to be useful.

Unless, of course, you are talking about some other argument and leaving out context so you don't have to try to support your point.

Either way, as I said, yet another misrepresentation by you.

 

I am continuing to discuss in good faith. I interpret what you've written in this thread as follows: 1) the draft was instituted 35 years ago, therefore; 2) even if the evidence suggests it had no impact on competitive balance then; 3) that evidence can't (or couldn't) be taken as evidence that today the draft has no effect with respect to competitive balance. You characterize statements to the contrary as "ridiculous," worthy of "snark." Yet I and others are to somehow take it on faith that because scouting has grown so much more sophisticated deep-pocket teams must necessarily wind up with all the top-shelf talent.

Let me pose an alternate hypothesis regarding why the draft was instituted: The draft was a collusive restraint of trade conceived among the owners to increase their share of the wealth baseball players could produce. Signing a prospect to a baseball contract was (and remains) a risky proposition. Big signing bonuses were on the line. A given prospect might have been worth, say, $600,000 in present and future cash flows (including those that might result from selling his contract to another team at some point in the future). In that regime, with all teams in the bidding, it would be reasonable to expect that prospect’s signing bonus to approach $600,000. However, with a draft, that prospect was restricted to negotiating with one team. What was the effect? Well, Reichardt signed for a bonus of $205,000 in 1964; 15 years went by before someone else had a signing bonus that large, and that intervening period was decidedly not a time of low inflation. That strikes me as an awfully compelling piece of information. It seems to me, in fact, to be nearly sufficient to explain why a draft was instituted, which is the whole point of this thread.

I have enjoyed this tete-a-tete, however, because it has taken me toward some fascinating reading. Horowitz's 1997 piece in Review of Industrial Organization, for example, suggests that baseball has become more competitively balanced over the last decades. (As an aside, he has some pretty good lines in there: "[N]either Rome nor the Atlanta Braves’ current pitching staff was built in a day ....") From Berry et al., authors of the Wages of Wins: "Our findings in a nutshell… we found that changes in competitive balance were driven by changes in the population of talent baseball drew upon. Baseball’s amateur draft and the institution of free agency were not found to significantly impact changes in competitive balance."

I am not an economist, and I don't play one on TV. I have had extensive advanced training in industrial organization economics, however, as that was an area that initially played a prominent role in my dissertation research. This body of theory visits phenomena such as cartels and relative bargaining power. It also points to the role that uncertainty plays in such settings. Further, I am in my professional life heavily involved with statistics; I depend upon statistics and data, however imperfect, to answer questions that interest me. I am also a huge baseball fan.

Let me also point out that the "lying eyes" comment could be directed at any of us. Humans are terrible at dealing with randomness and ambiguity. We see patterns that aren't there, and we fail to see patterns that are. If you are interested, I would point you toward "How We Know What Isn't So" by Thomas Gilovich.

 

A few problems with what you wrote.

One, a large part of your post argues about the motivations for MLB instituting the draft, not the results. Those are two separate things. I have never said that controlling costs was not at least a part of the motivation for instituting a draft in any sport. I'm sure it was. I'm also sure that competitive balance was a factor.

Whether or not the owners intended to foster competitive balance when instituting the draft is irrelevant to whether or not the draft has actually helped to do so. While the initial question that started the thread was asking why there is a draft, the idea that I called ridiculous was that drafts do nothing for competitive balance.

The point that I said was worthy of snark was the poster asking me to explain how player scouting and procurement had changed over the last 45 years. By the way, that was another problem with your response. The MLB draft was instituted 45 years ago, not 35.

Removing the draft would lead to all players going to the highest bidder, allowing the teams with deeper pockets to pick and choose who they want and leave the scraps for everybody else.