I love the draft. However, when viewed in detail, I find it disgusting that workers entering the industry do not have a say in which company they work for or where they will be sent. But since we have a draft, and it seems very unlikely that that will change in the near future, I like to cover it.
This is a combination of novice baseball (especially college ball, my biggest passion) and the professional game. It is the beginning of a new era of possibility; months, we don’t know for sure when Roch Cholowsky or Jackson Flora will play in the pros. The moment we find it is exciting. I like to see the stars of tomorrow before they solve their problems is the good finishing school that is minor league baseball.
This is a rare position among baseball fans – even diehard fans – and the media. In American professional sports, the public’s interest in the draft is equal to the proximity of the draftees to the major leagues. This is as close to a law of physics as you will find in sports, but since the pandemic, Major League Baseball has played with the limits of that law.
I’ve followed the draft pretty closely since it was just broadcast on MLB Network, followed by a conference call, but this is the first one I’ve seen in person.
Its features were impressive. The set, which had three arched screens spanning the width of the Grand Hall of the Pennsylvania Convention Center, was magnificent. It may not have been as exciting a place as the Fort Worth Stockyards – if the air in Philadelphia wasn’t like an autoclave right now, it would be fun to set the stage at Independence Mall – but the Convention Center lies in the heart of Center City and hosts events like this all the time.
The crowd that filled the limited seating area, did as advertised. When the selection of major league mascots came in before the first pick, they lashed out at Blooper. Commissioner Rob Manfred got the expected boos when he was introduced; when he announced the Braves’ pick at no. 26 and announced that the Mets were on the clock at no. On the 27th, those scoffers reached such a peak that even the usual humorless commissar could not suppress a sarcastic laugh.
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But the organization of the event was flawed. There is a skybridge between the event hotel and the Convention Center; I made it through about three hours before the first pick and was wheeled through the security checkpoint. Soon after, the bridge was closed, forcing some printers to walk a long way around the bridge. Verification scanners did not work, causing delays. Granted, this isn’t really MLB’s fault, and no one cares when the media gets distracted, but we don’t get into problems like this in important events like the playoffs, and we rarely do in regular season games. If you want your event to be noticed, you make the process of covering it as smooth as possible.
In years past, the festivities proper would end after one round, but some of the Day 1 picks will still be shown on screen while writers build their calendars for the event — not just our conference, but MLB.com, USA Todayyahoo, Baseball ProspectusESPN, as well American baseballjust to throw out the names of the letters sent by the writers I talked to — they put together an outline of the draft. The printing press would be closed only after the day was chosen. This time, the draft board went dark shortly after the first inning, and the working media were chased out of the hall shortly after Manfred’s blessing, leaving only the MLB.com live broadcast desk still in operation as stage players hit sets. By the time league officials decided people could stay for an hour, most of the writers had left.
For an event designed to highlight talented footballers, they were thin on the ground. Before the White Sox made their first pick, a couple of former players — Greg Luzinski and Jimmy Rollins, who also accidentally became local legends in Philadelphia — appeared and chatted with MLB Network’s Robert Flores for a few minutes. But that was about it.
Last year’s draft was the first time in 15 years that no one went in person, and no one went Saturday in Philadelphia. This was not a scandalous revelation; Last year’s draft took place in Cobb County, Georgia, which is one of the legends of amateur baseball. The closest thing we had to a hometown prospect in this year’s first round was a pair from New Jersey, University of Virginia linebacker AJ Gracia and Coastal Carolina forward Cameron Flukey, both of whom grew up more than an hour away, beyond the far reaches of Philadelphia.
The highlight of every NFL and NBA draft on TV is seeing the best college players take the stage and stand in their new team’s cap and jersey, and introduce themselves to their new fan community. That’s never been such a big deal in baseball, but you don’t have to go back too far to find some really fun times. In 2024, Pittsburgh-born JJ Wetherholt showed up in Fort Worth wearing a black Stetson and a bow tie, to the tumult of fans in attendance. It was the first star moment for a player who quickly showed he was a star in the making.
Interaction with the prospects themselves was limited to a series of canned interviews taped at the MLB Draft Combine in Phoenix last month, and an MLB Network segment on Georgia Tech catcher Vahn Lackey, the tight end’s no. 3 perfect choices. In the assembly hall, we did not see Cholowsky’s reaction to the first selection, and we may be the better for it; when it came time for Manfred to call out the name of the top pick, he mispronounced it.
I was left wanting more, but I will sit at my computer and refresh the Draft Tracker on MLB.com all day long live no matter where the draft is held, or under what circumstances. All things considered, I enjoyed the game, but it felt like an afterthought.
That goes back to how Major League Baseball looked to be going in the first half of this decade. In 2021, the draft moved from early June to the All-Star break. The postponement eased the burden of college draft picks with about a month left in the season — every year, a handful of players are selected during the NCAA tournament playoffs — but it was supposed to bring the draft out of that sleepy TV studio in Secaucus and make it a spectacle for fans.
MLB has begun hosting the Draft Combine, which puts its future stars on television and in front of the national media, including yours truly. In 2023, I spilled more than 4,000 words of virtual ink on the question of whether the Combine, attended by few fans, could grow into something worthy of public interest.
It was an interesting question, I thought, not least because it was important to MLB officials. The answer, both to my subject and the Combine in general, was that almost no one cared in the general area.
Three years later, the draft has moved from a Sunday night primetime slot to a post-hangover brunch hour on Saturday. ESPN used to send Kiley McDaniel to call the draft alongside Kyle Peterson, Eduardo Perez, and a selection of the network’s college baseball announcers. NBC, in its first year with the rights to the event, used the MLB Network panel. Only the top ten picks were able to be heard on NBC itself; after that, viewers had to switch to MLB Network and Peacock.
The first round alone competed directly with 10 regular season games. Even considering the day of the week, that’s a huge number of games per day; it’s almost as if MLB has deliberately planned an event that it has been trying to turn into a special event for the past two or three years. When I got back to my hotel and turned on the MLB Network, I saw the Big Inning coverage; the final three rounds of Day 1 were reduced to streaming on MLB.com.
I don’t know if I’m cynical enough to believe that the draft backsliding was a calculated decision, that MLB is shortening the draft to soften the ground for limiting it in the next CBA. In the unlikely event that MLB gets its 12-round, all-college draft, the league will pay to make sure top prospects, reputations burned by two years of exposure on the road to Omaha, will be there to pick up a jersey and shake hands with a Manfred fan. Intentionally or not, that could make a big difference in the 2025 and 2026 drafts, which may have been conference calls, as they were 20 years ago.
However, this is clearly not an event you are interested in. The schedule is different and the TV sets are a million times more fans, but MLB has once again treated the draft like it’s only for illness.
Good. Like I said, I’m a draft sicko. It’s just disappointing that the league isn’t trying to create more of us.
