Not that I care a whole lot about the amateur draft in baseball,  or about the justice of awarding the top draft pick to the team with the previous season’s worst record, or about the injustice in encouraging tanking by rewarding poor play with unduly high draft picks, but I had another nutty idea that I’d like to float past your windows for a moment. I think this idea would have the effect of making the bad teams better sooner and the good teams struggle a little harder to stay on top, which I view as virtuous. You may not.

Imagine we had a draft in baseball where the worst team (the team with the number #1 pick) still gets to draft the #1 player, BUT the #2 team gets the next two picks, and the team with the #3 position gets the next three picks, and so on.

Obviously, this would degrade the inherent value in having the #1 pick, no question about that. Would you rather have the #1 pick or would you prefer the #2 AND the #3 pick in the draft?

Again, obviously (to me anyway), most years  there isn’t much difference between the #1 pick and the #2 pick. I imagine most teams picking first have a spirited internal discussion about who that pick will be right up to the last minute. So getting the #2 and #3 is much better than just getting the #1. Right?

OK, so now imagine that the worst team, the one that gets to pick first, also gets to choose WHEN it wants to pick. Instead of being forced to choose first and take the top pick in the draft, as now, that team can choose to pick second, taking the second and the third picks. Yet again obviously, the second position is advantageous because lots of time the top two teams (i.e., the teams with the worst records) don’t even agree on who the best player in the draft is, so in choosing to draft second, the worst-record team will often get their own top pick anyway, plus another excellent player. So I think we all agree that picking second is smarter than picking first, except maybe in those very rare years that the top pick is an instant star and the second pick is not, and even then I don’t know that "very rare" covers it.

In this scenario, the second-worst-record team then would get the #1 draft pick, after the worst-record team opts to pick second. But they are also allowed to pick any remaining position they like in the drafting order and, following the logic we just used, would probably do pretty well to opt to pick third (and get the #4, 5, AND 6 picks in the draft) rather than picking the top guy.

Or maybe they’d decide that picking seventh (and getting the 22^nd-through 28^th picks) is their best drafting position. At some point, though, quantity becomes less important than quality. The best team in baseball, picking last, would get players that are the 436^th-best through the 465^th-best in the draft, which is close to useless. (And that also would conclude the entire draft for the year—just one huge round is all that’s needed.) But that also strikes me as just—they just won the World Series, they’re clearly a strong organization, they don’t have an immediate crying need for more good players, so going a season without any real draft picks seems fair, and certainly introduces real parity to baseball. A few years of picking towards the bottom of the draft would pretty much destroy any minor league operation.

Of course, we’d have to allow such teams to trade their big league players for any number of minor leaguers in an attempt to bolster the quality of their farm systems, so it’s not as if I’m dooming them to ruination. But the place I started out with was: what is the optimal strategy in such a set-up?  Would the worst-record team uniformly to choose to pick fourth in the draft (collecting the 7^th, 8^th,9^th and 10^th picks)? Or third, perhaps? At what point would a smart team decide, "Oh, the hell with it, we’re going for the #1 player in the draft rather than swapping him out for the bunch of humpties who are left?"

Seems to me that point would come rather late in the drafting process, since most bad teams won’t really be helped that much by having one excellent player—they’re bad because they’re weak in numerous spots, and need a lot of pretty good players more than they need one real good one. It would take some courage and some confidence in their scouting, I think, for a team to decide, "Let’s go with the #1 pick now—this guy is that good!" I can imagine a team that has great confidence in its instruction and development programs to think they can mold a few big leaguers out of the bottom of the barrel.

I realized very early in the process of thinking this system through, it would work only with baseball’s amateur draft,  In the NBA, for example, I don’t know if this system would even be worth it for the World’s Champion team to bother showing up. All you really have in the NBA is one or two roster spots that open for rookies every year, and in effect the rookie crop has just been through the NBA’s minor league system by the time they’ve been drafted. So you’re looking for that rookie (or two, if you’re very lucky) who can help you out right now. There would still be some swapping in the first few picks (the argument over the #1 pick vs. the #2 and #3 would still apply) but after a very short time, the swapmeet would be over. What the hell does an NBA team want with the 100^th-110^th best players in the draft? They can’t do any more with that than they could do with a mountain of stale Ritz crackers.

Baseball’s amateur draft is really unlike other sports’ but that doesn’t mean it has to be. I’ve never really understood the prohibition against trading drafting positions for other considerations in the first place. Other sports do that routinely and don’t seem to suffer for it. Personally, I think it’s sort of exciting if a team could exchange a top player for the right to pick first in the draft—exciting for both the excellent team and the abysmal one. Even without my nutty idea here, I’d favor that, though I think this nutty idea would also have its exciting moments.

I haven’t abandoned my series on small and big and gigantic improvements in baseball—I’m just stuck for the moment on the "gigantic" one, taking in all of baseball and human history, but I’ll get back to writing that soon. This just seemed a short and feasible topic to bring up, and for all of you to shoot down like so many shotguns aimed at one clay pigeon. Fire away!