Baseball questions

The Game Room
1

  1. What is a national crosschecker?

  2. In Japanese baseball, what is the “distribution draft?”

  3. Anyone know the story behind Astros minor leaguer Steve Martin, who was born in Swaziland?

Thanks.

2

  1. A team’s national crosschecker is a scout who compares prospects from all over the country. Most scouts are regional, so they cover a specific area. The NC will get recommendations from regional scouts for which guys to check out and compare to other prospects throughout the country.

  2. ?

  3. ?

You have some relatively obscure baseball questoins. I like it.

3

http://www.hsbaseballweb.com/pros/scouting_ranks.htm

That’s a decent, although brief, description of baseball scouting.

4
  1. Just as in American pro sports, if a league is expanded, (new teams added) existing teams get to “protect”, or exclude from the draft, a certain number of players (like 75% of their roster.) The remaining players then go into the “distribution draft” and the new teams get to pick a team from those players. MLB last did this when the Rockies and Marlins were added. I think it was called an expansion draft. It was done in MLS a couple of years ago when Montreal was added.
5

Nitpick: Devil Rays and Diamondbacks.