Seemingly everyone cares about the NFL Draft. Why is it though that in a league full of tanking to the top, no one cares remotely as much about the MLB version?
Raise your hand if you can remember the last time you watched the MLB Draft. Okay, maybe a few more than I expected; you are, after all, reading a baseball fan blog. How about planned your day around it though? Counted down the days? Have a slew of warm fuzzy MLB Draft memories you oohed and ahhed over with family and friends. Can conclusively tell me, right now without looking it up, when the MLB Draft is and where it is being held?
That’s what I thought. At this point, only Keith Law and Ken Rosenthal should still have their hands up (I choose to believe they follow me).
In case you hadn’t noticed, the NFL just completed another draft of their own. You might have been oversaturated by Thursday night. You might have been done with the revolving door of top pick speculation. But you probably watched anyway, even if you were just streaming on your phone while standing in line for Infinity War.
The NFL towers above MLB when it comes to player development. The first round broadcast stands as a marquee event on par with playoff coverage for the NFL. Conversely, baseball fans generally show more interest in spring training games than they will in tuning in to watch those first MLB Draft selections.
That opportunity is June 4th, by the way, coming to you on a Monday from Secaucus, New Jersey.
And with full apologies to Jersey, that sentence pretty well sums up the state of the MLB Draft.
In many ways, this makes no sense. Baseball fans love numbers, especially in this age of advanced analytics. Getting the chance to apply them to come up with some metric to adjust BABIP and exit velocity for metal bats should be a major rush. Football is a sprint, baseball is the marathon.
Pick anything you love about America’s pastime, contrast it with something you love about America’s game, and the end result usually translates to the baseball fan being the more likely stathead.
Fixing the MLB Draft
So is there anything to be done about this? What would it take to make the MLB Draft more enticing, more of the sports adrenaline rush the NFL will be putting out there Thursday night?
Absolutely. What follows over the next three slides are the three biggest problems facing baseball when it comes to marketing their player development, and three ways to help turn that around.