Episode Transcript
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[00:01:10] Speaker B: welcome to this week's edition of in
[00:01:12] Speaker C: the Clubhouse with EMD Baseball. I'm Andy Kirakidis, joined by my Wonderful Co host, Mr. Keith Glasser. How we doing sir?
[00:01:18] Speaker D: Great. How are you?
[00:01:20] Speaker C: Love that blue on you.
Yeah, we got the stuff.
We got our. We got our new EMD gear. Not for sale to the public at the moment, but maybe one day.
But we are here to talk about another potential change. I think there is a lot of things that need to get sorted, but there was a a recent statement by MLB making a proposal that would make some pretty significant changes to the draft process.
I'll cover kind of the high level here and then I'll kick it over to you for some some initial thoughts, but essentially what Major League Baseball and the owners have proposed, which will be a part of the collective bargaining negotiations coming up after this season, is that the MLB would further reduce the number of rounds in the MLB draft. For those of you who've listened to us before, prior to a couple years ago, the draft was 40 rounds and has since been cut back to 20.
Major League Baseball is proposing another cut to the size of the draft from 20 to 12 rounds, which would essentially eliminate about 240 picks.
In addition to that, probably the most noteworthy thing from a recruiting perspective would be that this would no longer allow high school players to enter the draft, although it should to be drafted since they don't, you know, actually enter the draft like the NFL and the NBA require them to do.
In addition, they wouldn't allow junior college players to be draft eligible after their, presumably most commonly their freshman year, but it essentially would have an age requirement for the draft, which would be 20, is what they've, they've initially proposed here.
In addition to that, right now, the current system is like a pool based monetary system where each team is essentially assigned a value that they're allowed to distribute across their draft before they get penalized, which is dictated by the slot recommendations that are proposed by Major League Baseball for each pick for the draft. Some of your picks allows you, your, your total pool bonus, but there is flexibility with how teams spend that money.
They would implement a hard draft slot bonus for each pick, which would mean there really wouldn't be any negotiation there, which I think is a fairly substantial, fairly substantial change.
This, the estimation is that it would cut the cost for Major League Baseball and the owners by roughly 50% in terms of the monetary spending for their, their draft bonuses.
So there's a, certainly a long way to go with whether this is going to be implemented, but certainly a hot topic of late. And I do think there's some impacts to college baseball and potentially some impacts to recruiting. So we're going to take a couple minutes to talk about that.
What are your initial thoughts here, coach?
[00:04:44] Speaker D: Sure, I don't, I don't know.
[00:04:47] Speaker E: I'm split on this.
[00:04:48] Speaker D: Right. Like I, I don't think that it's the worst idea in the world, but I also think that baseball for years, really forever as proven to this point that drafting high school kids does lead to success.
So I, I don't, I don't love the idea. Do I think that this entire thing is going to be implemented? No, I don't. I feel like this is like negotiating 101. We're going to over ask on the first one and then we're going to come back to the bargaining table because I think there's a lot of things at play.
You know, what, what are they going to do with internationals? Are they going to cap age limits at internationals? You know, I think some of this is a reaction to the five or five that is likely going to be passed or will be passed at this point, let's be honest and saying like, okay, you're going to have five years so you can get drafted, you're draft eligible after your sophomore year. I think they're going to, they would move that model to everyone, right where I would imagine that junior college kids are going to be, you know, have to go to junior college for two years and then you're draft eligible after your sophomore year. And I think that takes away, you know, it gives the opportunity for kids who are going to go to prep school and you know, reclass, you know, back and you know you're going to go to college for two years. And I think it also allows kids who, you know, under the current model, what's been that way forever, you got to go to school for three years. And there are plenty of guys who got drafted early, you know, later in the rounds when we are at 20 and you know, when we were at 40, who, you know, didn't sign, went to college and bet on themselves and three years later were really good and you know, a top five round pick, that stuff will still happen, but I think it makes it a little bit of an easier pill to swallow. Right? You know, two years is one less than three for all the math majors out there. So you know, two years is a little bit easier to be like, yeah, I'm just going to bet on myself and you know, instead of signing the 12th, I'm going to go to college and hopefully become a second, third, fourth, you know, first through fifth round or whatever it might be. You know, the interesting thing is that they've also said that they're, they're not going to dismantle or consolidate more of the minor league system, which means that all the spots are, you know, still there theoretically. You know, so how they fill that with just all college guys I think is interesting. I think the players association would probably have, you know, something to say about more or less wasting money.
You know, it's probably a bad way to say this, but like signing guys that you legitimately are just signing to a rookie ball deal just to have people on a roster when you could draft guys that you legitimately are invested in to try to get them, you know, to the upper levels of minor league baseball and then the big leagues, you know, so I, I, I, it's interesting, I think that we, we, we can go down some serious rabbit holes and make this along, but my knee jerk reaction, I, I don't, I don't think it's the worst idea, but I also, I think that baseball has proven that there's a support system and there is development for the high school age kid who ends up playing, who can get to the big leagues. And you know, you've seen them, right? Like top of our heads, we rattled off a bunch at this before we went on. But you know, your Jeter and Trout and a Rod and Correa and
[00:08:35] Speaker C: Harper
[00:08:36] Speaker D: is a different animal because he got his GED or he went to a junior, he got his GED and went to a junior college.
You know, but there's a lot of those guys. And in recent memory, you know, you have Jackson Holiday, he was a high school draft who made it to the big leagues when he was 19 years old. You know, so like it's, it's doable. Guys have proven and they've done it for a very long time.
I'm 99.9% sure Mickey Mantle was a high school draft, you know, so like
[00:09:04] Speaker C: there's,
[00:09:07] Speaker D: it's been going on forever. I don't, I don't love it, but I think that parts of this are going to be implemented and I think that not drafting high school kids will, will probably be left on the table, but if they do, I think college baseball will probably be electric. You're gonna have a bunch of guys in college for two years. They're gonna be really good.
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[00:10:31] Speaker C: Yeah, right.
Based off of last year's draft, if you were going to kind of slap the statistics over top of it, because I think it's, I think it's important to kind of level set with like the, the type of volume that we see. It's about 80% of the draft is college guys and college guys broadly under the umbrella of Division 1, 2, 3 Division, NAIA and Junior College.
The other 20% are high school guys. So last year there were 615 picks.
126 of those guys were high school guys, which is right at that 20% mark. I believe it's like 20.6% of those 126, 96 signed. So 76% of the high school kids signed and went on to play pro ball.
So yeah, you're going to see somewhere between 100 and 130ish guys roughly, that could potentially end up on campus.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's impactful for sure. To your point, you know, some of these, some of these superstar high school guys, you know, you might get to watch in the College World Series. I think it raises the level of play. I think it's mostly going to impact kind of three of the Power 4 conferences with a select group of schools outside of the Big 12, the SEC and the ACC where most of the high school guys who are drafted were, were likely going to be committed.
But I think it raises the level of college baseball at the top, which I think we've talked about this before. If this were to go through and those high school guys end up on campus, there is a trickle down effect. It's slightly smaller than, you know, it's significantly smaller than I think the roster cuts with the amount of spots that were moved for Division one that trickle down. But it is an impact. I think the bigger impact would be cutting it down by eight rounds where 240 draft picks are, they don't exist anymore. And there's the free agent side of this where guys sign after the draft and that'll still certainly will exist to your point, around filling out rosters and all that kind of good stuff.
But I think that reduction guys are retreating through the college system.
There's fewer of them moving on. So I think you're going to see a talent influx at the high school level that will make it to college. But then I think you're going to see guys who previously would have been pro guys specific, especially if the, the five for five passes which we anticipated will.
You're going to see guys staying on campus because they're not going to get drafted. So I think the combination of these things would make it really interesting. But you brought up a really good point ahead of this that this is kind of a teaser that gets thrown out, you know, public discourse over it. I think the reality is, is that pieces of this puzzle would get put in play.
And I agree with you that the high school guys will probably not be removed from the process. But I think you could still see the draft shortened.
I think you could see the slots hardened up quite a bit which could lead to more high school guys signing. Because now your ability to draft a kid in the 10th round and you cost saved in the second, third and fourth because you drafted some, some college seniors and you're able to lowball them on the money, like you don't have the ability to kind of take that money and Give it to a high school kid and make it worth his while. I think you might see that 75, 76% of high school kids who sign that could drop. Maybe it goes to 50%, maybe only 50% of the high school guys. So you do see a little bit of an influx in talent, but obviously there's a long way to go with this. But I think it speaks more to the constant state of evolution in the game of baseball broadly, but also how closely intertwined Major League baseball and college baseball have become, where there's a lot of discourse around how this would impact college and does college develop better than pro and all these. These different types of things. Now you throw in nil money, which is certainly intriguing for some high school guys that might be getting, you know, some substantial amount of money to not go into the draft. So there's, there's a lot here. I'm very interested to see what pieces of this puzzle ultimately get signed off by the Players association because I do think that their, their job fundamentally is to protect the rights and maximize the value of the player who's in Major League Baseball. And I do think that that really starts at the draft. So if Major League Baseball Players association looks at this and goes, hey, you're just trying to off off ramp development to college and you're trying to take money out of people's pockets because you don't want to spend as much money on the draft, I think they'll probably push back pretty hard here. But like most of these negotiations that have happened between the owners and the Players association, there's usually somewhere relatively close to the middle that they meet. So I'll be, I'll be very curious to see what the Players association is willing to concede to the owners and what they're gonna really kind of dig their heels in on.
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[00:16:50] Speaker D: I stand corrected.
Mickey Mantle was not drafted out of high school, but he was signed the first mlb. Do you know when the First MLB draft was.
[00:17:01] Speaker C: Oh, I'm going to take a guess. I do not know the answer off the top of my head, I would say like 1978, 1965. Oh, wow. I was way off. Okay.
[00:17:19] Speaker D: It was 20 rounds.
There were 20 picks in each round, and 15 high schoolers were drafted in the first round.
[00:17:28] Speaker C: Oh, yeah.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: Any.
[00:17:29] Speaker C: Any guys of note?
[00:17:34] Speaker D: Not in the first. Rick Monday was the first overall pick and he did play in an All Star Game, but Johnny Bench was selected in the second round, Nolan Ryan selected in the 12th, and Greg Nettles was selected in the fourth.
[00:17:58] Speaker C: I'll never forget Coach Rakuya.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: Ooh.
[00:18:01] Speaker D: Tom Seaver was selected in the 10th, but he did not sign and return to college.
[00:18:06] Speaker C: Where did he go to school?
[00:18:08] Speaker D: He went to the University of Southern California.
[00:18:11] Speaker C: Ah, very interesting.
I remember Coach Rakuya when we tried to bond when Pat Feeney.
Shout out Pat.
Tried to bunt on Ryan Zimmerman.
[00:18:29] Speaker D: Oh, yeah.
[00:18:30] Speaker C: University of Virginia. And for those of you who don't know, Ryan Zimmerman was one of the first college guys, and I shouldn't say one of the. He's definitely one of the first, one of the more notable guys to get drafted out of college. It was in the big leagues before the end of the season that he was drafted in.
Mr. Zimmerman, although we are contemporaries because we played on the same field one time or three times one weekend, he was in a different level than everybody else. And a young man named Pat Feeney tried to drag bunt on Mr. Zimmerman and he got thrown out by a substantial amount. And Coach Rakuya basically said, and shout out to coach for knowing that Pat is a Yankees historian.
Said, do you realize that's like trying to bunt on Greg Nettles?
And the point was taken by Mr. Feeney. And yeah, shout out Ryan Zerman. He hit an absolute Scud missile home run off of George Heath. You're welcome, George.
[00:19:36] Speaker E: He did.
[00:19:36] Speaker D: That ball was absolutely launched.
Yeah, he was.
I'm stating the obvious here, but he was very good at playing the game of baseball.
He's one of the best players I ever watched and played against.
It was.
[00:19:55] Speaker C: It was very apparent that he was playing and processing the game at a different level than the rest of us peasants at the time.
[00:20:04] Speaker D: It's the reason he had a pretty long big league career.
[00:20:08] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, very true.
[00:20:12] Speaker D: But you know, back to the point, I do think that there's, there's going to be some semblance of this stuff that's going to be implemented.
What was proposed will not be what ultimately is agreed upon that that comes into rule.
You know, I honestly, I would hate to see the high school guys being.
Not given the opportunity to be drafted. So I would, I would really like that we can keep, if we keep the high school guys in, you know, so I, I would honestly prefer that.
But I could definitely see shortening it. And, you know, I think you're just going to see more free agent signs at the end of the year,
[00:21:01] Speaker C: which
[00:21:02] Speaker D: isn't the worst thing in the world.
[00:21:06] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't have much more to add. Certainly something to keep an eye on.
[00:21:09] Speaker D: Yeah, this is going to be drag. This is going to drag on for months.
So hearing the initial proposal isn't going to do anything to, you know, it's not going to be set in stone anytime soon.
[00:21:24] Speaker C: All right, Anything else you want to add? Coach? No, sir. All right, well, thank you for listening, everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Thank you.
Thank you for listening this week.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and smash that like button for us. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, as well as Spotify. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram MD Baseball. If you want to find out what me and Keith do to help families and players navigate the recruiting process, go ahead and check us out on emdbaseball.com take a few minutes to check out our new online academy. I promise you'll get some good information out of that.
[00:22:03] Speaker C: Thanks again for listening.
[00:22:04] Speaker B: Check in with you next week.
