Tony Sanchez and Trading Draft Picks

In one sense, the first round (after Strasburg and Ackley) was a crapshoot; but there were certainly tiers of players who were generally grouped together. I cannot believe that Pittsburgh honestly thought Sanchez had a higher upside than a good 15 – 20 players that were available; the only reasonable explanation for their choice that I can find is that they felt economic pressure to select someone that (1) they believed was very likely to sign and (2) that was someone they could afford to sign.

I am not a Pirate fan nor an Oriole fan, but I was saddened by their picks. The whole purpose of the amateur draft is to distribute talent to the teams that (we assume) didn’t have much talent the previous year. Once again, that goal was not achieved.

Getting back to the original question, I think I’d like to see draft picks available for trade; but I agree there would have to be some kind of slotting system and perhaps a salary cap. My fear is that organizations like Pittsburgh are not just short-sighted and cash-strapped – I fear they aren’t smart enough to handle a newer flexible system that would allow the temptation of trading draft picks away.

Especially days 2 and 3. They made so many likely above-slot picks that towards the end I was starting to get worried that they weren’t picking enough organizational filler to staff rosters at the lower levels (they also picked 34 pitchers out of their 51 picks).

The real test will be whether they can sign enough of these people to outweigh going conservative in the first round, but they sure hedged their bets by making sure they had plenty of options should some of them decide to honor their college commitments.

Depends on the budget Pittsburgh has allocated for the draft. Let’s say they had a $9 million draft budget. That means they could have gone with say, Matzek at #4 leaving them $1-2 million to spend on the rest of the draft. Instead, they spend $2.5 million on Sanchez(all of what, $25K over the suggested slot amount, not exactly a huge deal) which would leave them $6.5 million for the rest of their draft.

I mean what were people expecting Sanchez to sign for? Sure, it’s just over the suggested slot amount, but it’s way less than what the “better players” they should have taken at #4 would have cost. The only way thisgoes wrong is if Pittsburgh goes cheap on all the other picks, nullifying the reason to draft Sanchez in the first place.

and sign with an agent. Right now, college/HS players can have an agent as an “advisor” without hiring them, which preserves their eligilibility as I understand it. With the NBA draft, players can declare, but if they haven’t signed with an agent prior to the deadline they can go back to school(basically if they’ve gotten word from teams that their draft position isn’t worth staying in the draft). They’re actually moving the deadline back for next year in the NBA, I think it’s May 8th or something starting next year.

So you do the same thing, make HS seniors and college juniors(and eligible sophomores) declare for the draft and hire an agent by a set date. I’d say mid-May at the latest, but maybe as early as the first of May or even sometime in April, if teams needed more time to re-adjust their draft boards. Like PT mentions about the NHL draft, in the NBA once a player is drafted, his rights are owned by the drafting team regardless of whether he signs right then or not. It’s why you see NBA teams draft European players and leave them overseas for a few years, they can wait as long as they want to try and sign them(Arvydas Sabonis was drafted by the Blazers in like 1986 but didn’t sign with them until the mid to late 90’s).

Now you could skip the declaring for the draft and all, and just go with the teams retain the rights to players they draft whether they sign or not. High school kids could still go play college ball if they wanted, they’d just know what team they have to negotiate with when they’re ready to play pro ball. That eliminates the whole Indy ball scene/using college as leverage aspect to the draft, so guys like Crow and Scheppers last year couldn’t just sit out because they don’t like the money offered. You wouldn’t have to add picks as compensation if a team doesn’t sign the player they drafted the year before, like the Nats getting the #10 pick because they failed to sign Crow.

My thought is to go with hard slotting on each pick, make players declare for the draft, and let teams retain the rights to the players they draft. You’d shrink the draft pool a bit, probably allowing the draft to be shortened by 10-15 rounds at least I’d think, maybe as much as 20-25. Because of the hard slotting, the players that do declare for the draft would know they need to sign if they really want to play pro ball. It takes away the advantage/leverage the draftees and agents have over the teams right now, and it helps the teams drafting at the top get the best players, ideally leading to more parity in the league. Even without a salary cap parity could be achieve to an extent, because the best players aren’t falling to good teams to do bonus demands, and the worse teams would potentially get 6 years of service time minimum from the top talent year in and year out.