“You could push the draft back, kick it into July,” said one general manager whose team picks in the top 10 this year, “but at some point, we’ll have to draft.”
MLB teams have pulled their scouts off the road, which makes sense because there’s almost nothing left to scout with all Division I college teams either suspending or canceling their seasons already, and many high schools doing the same. If no amateur players return to the field, which is possible, we’d have the shortest draft scouting season in history — four weekends of college play, with some high schools in the South playing for about a month and others in the North and Midwest yet to begin. One first-round prospect, Pennsylvania high school pitcher Nick Bitsko, threw a bullpen in front of scouts a week ago … and that’s it. His school district has suspended all athletics until at least April 14; if that date holds, they’d have a 10-game season, and that’s a best-case scenario right now. For a player who was likely to command $3 million or more in the draft, it’s a major setback to be unable to throw in games in front of scouts.
Advertisement
I spoke to several scouting directors and vice presidents, as well as the above-quoted GM and a source from Major League Baseball (who deferred comment for now), to ask about the challenges of this draft season and what, if anything, they thought the league should do to address the question of how teams can evaluate players in this class. The draft is currently scheduled for June 12 and was to take place in Omaha to try to coincide with games in the College World Series. The NCAA canceled the CWS this week, so it seems likely that the draft will return to the MLB Network Studios in Secaucus, or just be held as a conference call like it was in the pre-television era (till 2007).
“I can’t imagine college baseball and high schools play the rest of this year,” said one VP who oversees amateur scouting for his team. “If that’s the case, and we resume (professional) baseball around May 1, I’d advocate to move the draft up so we could get some kids out for extended and short-season,” meaning that players who were drafted this year would play more in pro ball than draftees typically do. Most teams shut pitchers down, or have them throw extremely limited innings, because their spring workloads were often quite high. That would no longer apply if the amateur levels don’t return to the field. “If, for some crazy reason, we have the opportunity to see them more, then I say move the draft back.”
“I do not think we need to move (the draft) back,” said another VP and former scouting director. “I think we should have regional combines starting in mid-April,” or whenever public health officials deem it safe to resume such gatherings. The idea of combines came up in several of my conversations around the shutdown — scouting directors and GMs have long wanted an organized system like the NFL has, especially for the purpose of gathering information on players’ health and medical records.
A combine, however, isn’t a strong substitute for games when we’re talking about evaluations. Combines might involve players running the 60 or throwing bullpens, but they’re not going to include real games, especially given the numbers of players involved. “How are you going to do that? Invite the top 300 players, who you drug test, over a five-day period?” asked one scouting director. “You can’t have games in a combine, just workouts,” which isn’t optimal at all for the way teams evaluate players today. “Are you going to spend all this bonus pool money on players your decision-makers haven’t seen? You haven’t seen some of these players in six or seven months” — since last summer, when scouts were out evaluating players with the expectation that they’d see the players again in the spring.
The GM quoted at the top of this story suggested that we might see some “thrown-together tournaments” in May, not too dissimilar from those that typically open the college season, to allow some teams to resume play, or for high schoolers to come to showcase-like events aimed at scouts and college recruiters. He also thought, or hoped, that MLB and the NCAA would more be liberal in allowing individual teams to work players out before the draft, although he and other sources all indicated the potential unfairness — not to mention the travel chaos — of such a rush to invite players to visit up to 30 teams.
Advertisement
The lack of scouting time also means that the data teams typically use, especially for college players, is suddenly far less useful. “Any time the sample is smaller, it’s worse. It will present some conundrums for teams that have college statistical models, which almost all of them do. This hasn’t happened before.” Will models get confused by dealing with such a small sample of about 15 games, nearly all of them played against nonconference opponents? A year ago today, Hunter Bishop was one of the top performers in the country, and Kam Misner was getting top 10 overall buzz. Both played substantially worse against in-conference opponents, and ended up going 10th (Bishop) and 35th (Misner).
If there’s a way to get amateur players back on the field in May, MLB could keep the draft where it is, but perhaps shorten it to, say, 20 rounds, which would preserve the top of the draft. Some players will inevitably be hurt by the abbreviated season; players in cold-weather states whose seasons never started, the “Northeast college pitcher who was suddenly throwing 94 this spring” (an example from one GM), or any player who worked this offseason to change his conditioning or his game will be worse off because of the shutdown. That part is inevitable. The players who came out of last summer as first-rounders will almost all still be first-rounders now, because the summer evaluations (and data, where available) will take precedence in evaluations. Maybe Pete Crow-Armstrong, an outfielder whose school, Harvard-Westlake, has already canceled the remainder of its season, doesn’t get to erase the memories of a tough summer with a strong spring. That’s unfortunate, but there’s little way to help those players. What MLB can do, however, is try to organize ways for scouts to see players, once the public health authorities deem it safe for people to gather again, and work with amateur institutions to waive the typical restrictions on amateur players. Nobody’s eligibility should be at stake here, not in these extraordinary circumstances, but it is in everyone’s best interests to get players in front of scouts in May if the crisis has passed. It’ll fall to Major League Baseball itself to find the best way to do that.
(Photo: Barry Chin / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
