Soaring payrolls make draft more important than ever
Posted: Friday May 30, 2003 11:30 AM
Young phenoms like Mark Prior are worth their weight in gold to a club. AP
$5.3 million
The largest signing bonus in draft history, given by the White Sox to 2000 first-round pick Joe Borchard. The first player ever selected in the draft, Rick Monday, received a $104,000 bonus from the Kansas City A's in 1965.
Rejected promotions by the Brewers:
1
Bud Selig dunk tank.
2
Toss meat at Glendon Rusch.
3
Guaranteed dugout sunflower seed shells.
4
Whole upper deck section to yourself.
5
Find Jeffrey Hammonds.
6
Attack the Sausage Racers!
By Jacob Luft, SI.com
For the majority of major league clubs, the biggest day of the season isn't Opening Day or a September showdown with a division rival.
It's next Tuesday, when baseball holds its annual draft.
Pennants will be won and lost. Front-office careers will be made and ruined. People will show up for a Brewers game ... OK, OK, we made that last part up. Besides, why get so melodramatic about it? We're just talking about the baseball draft here, right? It's not even on television, for crying out loud, so how important can it be?
In a word, plenty.
MLB does have the most nondescript draft of any of the major sports. The teams don't even feel a need to gather for it -- they have a giant conference call instead. The next time you're stuck in one of those boring teleconferences with your co-workers on the other side of the country, yell out "Jarrod Saltalamacchia, catcher, West Palm Beach, No. 68754344..." Everybody will think you're an idiot, but at least you'll get to feel like a bona fide MLB scouting director.
From its inception in 1965 until just a few years ago, the baseball draft was veiled in enough secrecy to make a freemason jealous. Weeks would pass before all of the picks were made public. Now baseball has a vested interest in the Internet through MLB.com, which has helped bring the draft more into the public eye.
The lack of hype doesn't make the baseball draft any less important. The reason for that is economics. In the current climate, where 21 teams have at least one player making $10 million or more (the Yankees have seven), the most valuable commodities are the pre-arbitration and pre-free agency superstars that have emerged in the past few seasons.
The way the collective bargaining agreement works, players have to earn about three seasons of major league service time before becoming eligible for arbitration. For those first three seasons, teams decide what they pay the players, which is why the Reds are getting star-quality production from second-year player Austin Kearns while paying him only $350,000. His stud teammate, Adam Dunn, is making only $400,000 in his third season. The best way to find low-priced gems like these is through the draft. In 1998, in what may go down as the single-best draft of this era, the Reds took Kearns in the first round and Dunn in the second.
Players don't get to free agency until they have reached six years of service time, which is why the low-budget Oakland A's are the envy of the major leagues with their young, powerful pitching trio of Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder. Oakland wisely has bought out their arbitration years through long-term contracts, locking up Hudson through 2005 and Zito and Mulder through 2006. After that, they cease to be bargains when the Yankees or Mets open up their pocketbooks and pay them whatever they want.
Cheap Tricks
The best homegrown, pre-arbitration eligible (less than three years of service time) players:
Player
Rnd.
Bonus
Salary
Rocco Baldelli
1st
$2.25M
$300,000
Hank Blalock
3rd
$288,000
$302,500
Adam Dunn
2nd
$772,000
$400,000
Eric Gagne
NA
NA
$550,000
Marcus Giles
53rd
NA
$316,500
Austin Kearns
1st
$1.95M
$350,000
Brett Myers
1st
$2.05M
$300,000
Roy Oswalt
23rd
$500,000
$500,000
Corey Patterson
1st
$3.7M
$365,000
Mark Prior
1st
$4M
$1.45M
Albert Pujols
13th
$60,000
$900,000
Alfonso Soriano
NA*
$3.1M
$800,000
Vernon Wells
1st
$1.6M
$520,000
* Signed out of Japanese minor leagues
For the average fan, the sheer size of the draft can be intimidating. The NFL and NBA versions are short and easy to digest, with every self-acclaimed expert spitting out instant analysis and "grades" for each club. That's not how it works in baseball. With prospects coming from hundreds of college and high school programs, it goes on for 50 rounds. It looks like a giant crapshoot, and for the most part it is. But just like in the NFL draft, mistakes are costly in terms of manpower and money. The average signing bonus for the top 100 picks last season was above $1 million. And if your prospects don't pan out, you have to venture into the costly free-agent market to fill your needs.
On the other hand, there is a fair amount of certainty in the first few rounds. According to Baseball America, 50.9 percent of first-round picks signed from 1965-95 -- the first 30 years of the draft -- played in the majors for longer than three years. That number is still solid for players taken in the second (28.8 percent) and third rounds (23.9). It shrinks to 17.4 for fourth, 14.8 for fifth, and 11.4 in the 6-10 rounds.
Bargains are there to be had Tuesday. With some shrewd scouting and a little dumb luck, even the Brewers have a chance to turn their franchise around.
This week's topic: The three most underachieving teams in baseball.
1. Philadelphia Phillies You know things are bad when you've lost four out of six to the Piazza-less Mets. The struggles of Pat Burrell (.207 batting average), David Bell (.217) and Marlon Byrd (.195) are the major reason the Phillies are 11th in the NL in slugging percentage.
2. St. Louis Cardinals For a team with this roster to be only two games above .500 is stunning. With Matt Morris and Woody Williams atop the rotation, a stout lineup and Gold Glove-studded defense, they should be the class of the NL Central. The problem is the sans-Jason Isringhausen bullpen, which is only 11 of 24 in save opportunities and has resorted to using Cal Eldred in key situations.
3. Anaheim Angels The bullpen isn't the problem here. It's the starting pitching. Angels starters have allowed the most home runs in the AL (50) and sport a 5.05 ERA, compared to 2.91 for the bullpen. Offensively, Lady Luck may be turning on Anaheim. Last year, the Angels grounded into the fewest double plays in the AL; this year they have the second-most GIDPs.
Welcome to the world of alternate photo captions:
Forget the skull tag. Eric Young prefers the "tickle tag."AP
President Bush shows Mike Scioscia and the Angels how much they will save with his new tax cut.AP
Miami Herald photographers claim jockey Jose Santos needed an illegal device to guide the ball to home plate. AP
"Aside from the awful defense, the punchless offense and being in last place, signing with the Mets was a great idea."AP
The Orioles broke a stalemate with their No. 1 pick from last year, Adam Loewen, just in time to keep him from slipping back into this year's draft. But the deal came at a huge price, and not just in dollars. Loewen got plenty of those, to be sure, signing for $4 million.
He also got a nice little perk: A major league contract.
For every season Loewen does not make the team out of spring training, the Orioles will have to use one of his options to send him to the minors. If he doesn't make the team by 2007, his options will have run out and the club will have to expose him to waivers to send him down. That won't happen, though, because they would surely lose their investment. The more likely scenario is that they would keep him in the major leagues for the whole season, the same way the Reds have had to keep Wily Mo Pena this year.
As any Reds fan has learned in a rather painful way by now, Pena is not ready for the big leagues and is doing nothing except taking up a valuable roster spot. He has all of 27 at-bats on the season, producing three hits.
Grissom
The Pirates must be ecstatic with Kenny Lofton, who is riding a 25-game hitting streak, but the Giants certainly don't miss him. That's because Marquis Grissom is having a monster season in center field for San Francisco. He had a strong year with the Dodgers last year, posting an .831 OPS, and is now hitting .314 with seven homers and 25 RBIs with an OPS of .840. Grissom's 13th-inning triple against the D'backs on Tuesday gave the Giants a come-from-behind, 4-3 victory. ... After trading Ryan Dempster to Cincinnati last season, the Marlins were stuck with 15,000 of his bobblehead dolls. They decided to give them away when the Reds come to town this weekend, but now Dempster is in the minors on a rehab assignment and won't make the trip to Miami. The Fish are going through with the promotion anyway, in case anybody wants a porcelein model of a pitcher with a 7.62 ERA in his old uniform. ... Florida's Justin Wayne and Cincinnati's Jeff Austin must be tied at the hip. They are both former Stanford right-handers who can't get out of the first inning. That doesn't bode well for Indians prospect Jeremy Guthrie, also an ex-Cardinal. ... "You're outta here!" That's what Gary Sheffield told super agent Scott Boras. Well, not literally, but the Braves slugger did fire the most notorious agent in the game, saying he will negotiate his own free-agent deal this offseason and save himself the 5 percent. ... As long as they are playing for World Series home-field advantage in the All-Star Game, why can't the leagues also put the top pick in the draft at stake? As it is now, a rep from one of the worst teams -- a Padre or a Brewer -- can help the teams like the Giants or Braves win the World Series. If they also were playing for the top pick, which still alternates every year, the players from the best teams would be helping out the worst teams, too.
Forget the skull tag. Eric Young prefers the "tickle tag."
President Bush shows Mike Scioscia and the Angels how much they will save with his new tax cut.
Miami Herald photographers claim jockey Jose Santos needed an illegal device to guide the ball to home plate. 
"Aside from the awful defense, the punchless offense and being in last place, signing with the Mets was a great idea."
