Baseball draft doesn't deserve the hype

The first-year player draft in professional baseball has to be the most over-hyped and ridiculous draft of the four major sports.

Nobody cares about the hockey draft, other than the parents of the players getting picked and those that get paid by the organizations that pick them, so it can’t be considered overhyped.

The baseball draft, however, gets the full treatment by ESPN – hours and hours of coverage, just like basketball and football, but the payout is far less.

There have been great No.1 overall picks in the history of baseball – Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, etc…but more often than not even the best of players take years to get so much as a sniff at the majors, if ever.

Are we supposed to be excited about a guy our local team chooses so that five years from now we can hope he’ll actually crack the big-league 25-man roster?

In the NFL and NBA there are busts, no doubt. That is, unless the Chargers picked Ryan Leaf because they wanted him to be coaching Division II college football within a few years, or if the Pistons were just helping the league work toward greater competitive balance when they drafted Darko.

Surely there are going to be swings and misses, so to speak, in every sport. But, with baseball, unlike the NBA and NFL, it seems like it’s more the rule than the exception that the highest picks don’t provide any tangible contribution until the next presidential election.

With football and basketball you feel like your draft picks are people who can play a role in your team’s success sometime in the next year or two, not someone who your unborn kids might be able to follow in their teenage years.

And why in the world are there 50 rounds? Do we really need that many players going pro? I feel like if you can chew gum and walk at the same time there is a place for you in some professional baseball league.

You might be asking yourself, “Man, just how unnecessary is it to have 50 rounds?” So much so that the Colorado Rockies used one of their picks in the 2000 draft on then- Virginia Tech QB Michael Vick.

Vick told USA Today at the time that he was shocked considering he hadn’t played the sport since eighth grade. Yeah, I’d be shocked, too.

The scouting director for the Rockies at the time, Bill Schmidt, gave this explanation for drafting a player that had literally no chance of playing for his club: “The way he ran around the field we figured he could track down some balls in the outfield at Coors Field…it wasn’t a big risk taking him at that point.”

Wow – “we figured he could track down some balls.” Good insight there.

Chasing balls down in the outfield – isn’t that what the scrubs do for the good players when they take batting practice? Never mind the whole hitting thing, as long as we have a guy that we figure can wander around for a while, we’ll be fine.

It’s a good thing that they didn’t use a high pick on him – oh wait, that was pick 30 of theirs that year. They were only just more than halfway through with their selections, and they were already in the “not really a risk stage” of the activities.

When the scouting director is picking guys that don’t even play the sport the draft is supplying players for, and still has 20 picks to go, there are issues with the way athletes are selected.

Maybe I’ll be proven wrong this year.

Maybe most of the players chosen in the draft’s first couple of rounds will see time at the big show within a year or two…but something tells me that not even Pete Rose would take that bet.

Anyway, I gotta run…I was just chosen with the 1,021st overall pick. Apparently, the Rockies like the way I can run in a straight line.