Four easy ways to fix the Major League Baseball draft

	The great foreign players, such as the Angels' Vladimir Guerrero, were not part of the First-Year Player Draft. AP
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Hoo, boy, hang on to your headsets and be sure to block your call waiting, because Major League Baseball is introducing its stars of tomorrow once again with the always exciting, goose-bump-raising ... conference call! Who needs Mel Kiper Jr. when you have Ernestine the operator?

There are many reminders why baseball, hidebound by tradition, evolves too slowly in some cases. Blacking out games on the Internet and DirecTV is one example. (Where is the guy who came up with the bright idea of refusing to give the customer what he or she wants?) But one of the more obvious points of neglect is the First-Year Player Draft, which is conducted Tuesday and Wednesday via conference call. It could be worse; at least it's not conducted via carrier pigeons.

Really, have you checked out some of the material needed to fill time on all the sports channels on television? Paintball? Darts? The World Series of B-List Celebrities You Never Heard of Even When They Were Quasi-Popular Poker? And you're telling me there is no way to get the best high school and college players (and occasional independent-league Scott Boras renegade) an hour or two on the tube?

The First-Year Player Draft will never equate to the NFL draft, in which many of the players already are familiar names because of the exposure of college football. But baseball needs some branding work here. Its own lack of regard for the event gives it a second-rate feel. Get this: Before MLB passed a rule limiting the draft to 50 rounds in 1998, baseball was the only sport whose draft ended out of boredom. Teams simply just quit drafting players when they felt like it, or when the deli spread in the war room ran out, whichever came first. The draft (get rid of that ridiculous "First Year" appendage) needs a makeover. Here's how to fix the draft.

1. Television

I don't care if you have to pay ESPN to put it on. Get it on TV, even if it's only the first round. Your hard-core baseball junkies will watch it. A few of your casual fans will check it out, because by virtue of carrying it on TV you are telling them it is important. Produce some behind-the-scenes features to introduce the stories behind potential first-round picks.

Is it a ratings blockbuster? Of course not. But you've got to care enough about your own sport to get your future stars some exposure.

We won't mention that one out of every three first-round picks never make it to the big leagues, even for one game. Think about that for a minute. You get your shot at thousands and thousands of players, and the game is still so hard to predict that your first pick is a complete waste 33 percent of the time. But for that one day, everybody thinks they have the next Roger Clemens on their hands.