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All sports drafts are scams, more or less. No computer engineer right out of
Carnegie Mellon has to go straight to a job at Comcast for a predetermined
salary. Electronic Arts representatives aren't lurking the halls of
Northwestern with charts and craniometers. The concept is absurd on its face,
and just as absurd when applied to young athletes.
What makes Major League Baseball's draft, which takes place in two weeks,
especially ridiculous is that in addition to being clearly unjust, it's also
inefficient. Drafting is no exact science in basketball or football, but at
least in those sports the top amateur talents are both readily identified and
actually available. Eight of the top 10 finishers in this year's NBA Most
Valuable Player voting were top-five draft picks overall, for example, and
Marc Gasol and Tony Parker, who weren't, were both special cases.
Of the 28 players who placed in the top 10 in last year's baseball MVP voting
or top five in Cy Young voting, though, a little more than half were
first-round picks. Eight were originally signed as amateur free agents,
meaning they weren't subject to the draft at all. The draft isn't a lottery,
but it's closer than it should be given that its nominal purpose is to
distribute the best talent to the worst teams.
One sign of this randomness is the way expected returns flatten out through
the draft. This year, the Mets, who were lousy last year, have the 11th
overall pick, while the Yankees, who were very good, have the 26th. If the
draft worked as it's supposed to, you'd expect that the Mets' pick would be
substantially more valuable, based on historical data.
That isn't even close to being true, though. Players picked 11th overall
between 1965 and 2005 (those picked since haven't necessarily had an
opportunity to show what they can do in the majors) have been worth an
average of 2.93 "wins" over the course of their careers, according to
Baseball-Reference.com. Those picked 26th have been worth an average of 3.02.
The earlier picks were at least a bit more likely to make the majors—28 did
so, as opposed to 20 of those picked later—but they weren't any more likely
to be really useful. (Four of them were worth at least 15 wins in their
careers, while three of the later picks did.) The best player taken in either
spot, the great Detroit shortstop Alan Trammell, was a 26th overall pick, and
he was worth more by himself than the three best 11th picks combined. That
will change before long, given that Pittsburgh's Andrew McCutchen, who was
taken 11th, is just at the start of his prime, but still.
Even more striking than the distribution, though, is the absolute level of
talent. Three wins, a reasonable expectation for what this year's Mets and
Yankees first-rounders will do in their careers, is about the value a decent
and unexceptional player like Daniel Murphy will have in a good year. It's a
really nice hot streak, a misplaced stroke in a ledger. It makes you
appreciate just how rare high-end baseball talent is.
Most of the value of such draft picks comes from the fact that ballplayers
who aren't yet eligible for free agency are paid millions of dollars less
than they're actually worth, so that even a scrub can be a valuable asset.
The rest comes from the small chance that the pick will deliver a player like
McCutchen or Trammell. You could thus say that baseball's draft combines the
worst features of buying scratch-off lotto tickets and attending an
accounting seminar while restricting the ability of young men to choose where
they want to work into the bargain. It's a great deal if you own a ballclub;
for everyone else, not so much.
The final absurdity might be that if you wanted to spread the best talent
around, getting rid of the draft would be a decent way to do it. The eight
amateur free agents who were top MVP or Cy Young finishers last year
originally signed with eight different teams. Only two, Adrian Beltre and
Robinson Cano, signed with teams in rich markets. Allow players to work where
they'd like and some will go for the glamor teams, but some will go for the
ones where they have the best chance to play, or to the towns with the best
weather, or the ones closest to home.
Open markets in talent work just fine in technology, law and soccer, and
they'd work just as well for baseball if anyone would give them a chance.
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2. 業餘FA反而更能平均分配天分
3. 選秀給老闆壓榨小球員 老闆爽 其他人則不
4. FA給球員選擇豪門 機會多 天氣好 或離家近的誘因
5. 自由市場在其他行業運作得很好 只要有機會在棒球也一樣行