Yes, I Know It’s Been Awhile
That’s what happens during baseball season, when your job — the one that pays — is related to baseball. Sorry, folks. Many times sorry. Anyway, a feel notable pieces of information.
I interviewed Sig Mejdal of “Fantasyland” fame. Sig is much smarter than me, he was once a rocket scientist for NASA and now he works in the Cardinals front office. Anyway, he has some interesting things to say about the MLB Draft and I recommend reading the whole thing, but I’ll excerpt the best part.
AJ: What makes a successful draft? If the Cardinals pick, say, 45 players this year, will it be considered a success down the line if one or two players make the majors? What about if five of the players from this year’s crop make the majors?
SM: I have never heard of any sort of rule of thumb as to a successful draft or not. I know that about 1/6th of drafted players make the majors, but I can’t imagine anyone saying that since we got “x” major leaguers, the draft was successful and we should be content with our performance. We draft 50 players and every one of them has a finite chance of making the majors. While the expectations are different for each player, our hopes are with each of them. As idealistic as it might sound, every time one of those players falls short of the big leagues, it is a disappointment — not only because the players’ dream of making the majors has likely disappeared but because we know there was still a major leaguer out there when we drafted that player and we missed that player.
Second, I will be part of a live chat on AOL Sports (link here) tomorrow at 2PM during the MLB Draft. The first chat I did earlier this week went really well, and it should be a regular thing every Tuesday at 1PM ET.