For close to five decades, the NFL has made a spectacle of their annual draft. They do it right. Now, MLB wants to follow suit.
It’s not just the attention (which equals revenue) that matters, it’s the way the NFL has used college football as a de facto farm system over that same time span. Baseball, on the other hand, had been drafting and taking years (and a lot of dollars) to develop younger high-school players in their vast farm systems, which was developed and put into place by Branch Rickey in the early 1930’s.
It’s taken a long time for MLB to accept that the NFL model is far more effective. Now that college baseball coaching and training has caught up to their football counterparts in pretty much every way, MLB franchises have loosened their grip, allowing the university programs to do more of their player development (both on and off the field) of young talent. Teams have started drafting more and more college players and fewer high schoolers, who take roughly twice as long to blossom and show a return on the club’s often sizable investment.
Recently, in one of their early “offers” to the MLB Players Union on the new collective bargaining agreement that needs to get done this coming winter, the owners have gone so far as to propose banning high-school players from the draft process altogether, and want to implement a 20-year old age limit on drafting players. And no surprise – they also want to slash the signing bonuses that go with that.
During the recently concluded MLB Draft, the owners and their clubs showed they’re serious about all this. Of the 613 players selected by the 30 MLB clubs over the weekend, only 127 of them (20.7%) came directly from the high-school ranks.
The Colorado Rockies had already fallen in line with this type of thinking. They’ve gone much heavier on college players for several years now, and this time around, they drafted just five high schoolers among their 21 picks, which, ironically, is actually the most prep players they’ve picked since 2019.
The reason for this is obvious. College players take less time, effort and capital to develop, and if they stay healthy and thrive, they can arrive at Coors Field that much sooner. But the Rockies and the rest of MLB are taking a big gamble that college baseball will grow and thrive in the era of the transfer portal and NIL.
In theory, forcing more high-schoolers to go to college first before turning pro should help grow the college game, right?
Perhaps. MLB sees the changes in the college game, moving from 11½ scholarships to 35 a couple of years ago, and thinks that means more scholarship opportunities for young baseball players across the board. But that’s not really the case. The vast majority of college baseball programs still can’t afford to offer or fund 35 scholarships. The revenue just isn’t there.
Baseball is the single most expensive “non-revenue” generating sport on almost every baseball playing college campus. With schools strapped for NIL cash these days, it’s very possible – probable even – that baseball will find itself on the chopping block at a whole lot of non-SEC locations in the coming years. College baseball may very well go the direction of college hockey, becoming a localized, climate-based sport. Currently, approximately 1,700 colleges and universities field a baseball team. Just over 600 send an ice-hockey team out to represent… and a lot of those are “pay-to-play” club programs.
Both Colorado and Colorado State offer club baseball and club hockey for the students through the school’s recreation department.
If schools start dropping baseball (or turning it into a club sport), that could then lead to the expansion of independent professional league baseball, whose teams are not attached to any MLB franchise and where players can become free agents after every season. They’ll need somewhere to go play, right?
The MLB Players Union opposes the shrinking of the draft pool – of course they do – and any reductions in the current minor league system. But that opposition is not the biggest obstacle. What the MLB owners have to be ready for is for colleges to start asking them to subsidize their college programs.
Somebody is still going to have to pay for player development, right?
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