Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.
If there’s a major weakness in commissioner Rob Manfred’s game, it’s his seemingly constant — and possibly even subconscious — itch to emulate the NFL when it comes to Major League Baseball. Replay started as a mirror to how football replay operates and we even have an extra innings (overtime) mechanism now to end the game as soon as possible.
One of many examples is the MLB Draft, which takes place this coming weekend at the site of the All-Star Game. In recent years, it’s been shifted on the calendar from June to mid-July, squeezed into the All-Star festivities. Why? Well, MLB wants a huge stage for the draft and is trying to make it destination television viewing in similar fashion to how the NFL Draft and, to a lesser extent, NBA Draft command attention.
There are a lot of problems with the approach of trying to make our draft the same level of an event as the NFL one. Foremost on the list would be that the NFL is a monster and MLB isn’t even in the same ballpark in terms on attention paid by casual fans.
Secondly, the biggest names in the NFL Draft have already commanded a ton of attention in college football, which is also wildly popular. To a lesser extent, a similar rule applies in the NBA Draft, when many of the top names off the board have already been heavily televised in college basketball games, including March Madness.
Baseball at the college ranks does have a national following, but it’s a fraction of college basketball and barely a blip in terms of popularity compared to college football.
Simply, people just don’t know these players. The only reason the overwhelming majority of fans this draft season have heard of any players would be the last name “Holliday.” That’s about it.
This isn’t to suggest there are no fans of prospects and/or the draft. There are. It’s just a niche audience and not a mainstream audience while Major League Baseball wants to treat it as the latter.
To wit, the MLB Draft last season saw its second-best TV audience ever at 863,000 (via Sports Business Journal). Wanna guess what the NFL got for Round 1 this year? It was 13.6 million.
With MLB not even drawing a million fans to watch the draft on TV, it isn’t worth the headache the league is causing the scouting departments of its 30 ballclubs. The draft is right now only a few weeks before the trade deadline. The league does it just so they can work the draft into All-Star Game coverage, but the resources of the 30 teams are better served concentrating on the draft right after the high school and college seasons conclude and leaving the early part of July to the trade deadline.
Further, MLB prospects are drafted and then head to the minors before eventually joining the big-league clubs. In the NFL and NBA, draftees make an immediate impact. If you want the masses of fans to pay attention to a draft, telling them they’ll have to wait two or three years to see a real impact on the big-league club is a good way to turn off the attention span. It just isn’t the same thing at all.
No, the prospects in Double-A and Triple-A are the ones who are close to making an impact on the MLB rosters and they already have a showcase during All-Star week. That would be the Futures Game, which has now been relegated to Saturday night, competing against actual MLB games.
How about putting the draft back where it belongs in early or mid-June and then showcasing the Futures Game on Sunday night in primetime on national TV? The main reason fans love the draft for other sports is because it can directly impact how good their favorite team is in the near future. The Futures Game is a much better sign for that in baseball than the draft. Oh, and it’s actually game action instead of just watching someone read off a bunch of names most fans haven’t yet heard of.
No, it won’t move the needle the way the NFL does with its draft — not even remotely close — but we can’t do that with any event in baseball. We can’t focus on what the NFL does. We should only focus on what matters for Major League Baseball and squeezing the draft into All-Star activities just doesn’t work.
This news was originally published on this post .
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