Someone spent too much time trying to make the baseball draft interesting.
It’ll never be interesting because unless you’re a scout, you don’t know who any of these people are and they’re not going to be contributing anytime soon.
With the NBA and NFL, you’ve watched the players in college for a year or more. Even if you’re not a fan of the college game, the players drafted will affect your pro team that year.
Not only that, the MLB draft is just fundamentally different than the other drafts. I tried explaining to my wife why the Royals didn’t take the best player left on the board (according to whatever list I had been looking at), but instead took someone much lower, who they knew they could sign for “less than slot”. It didn’t go well.
It was kind of interesting at the top, if only because we’ve actually heard some of those surnames before (their fathers). O’s picking first presumably got a good player to add to their loaded farm system, and the Nats at 5 look like they got a good one too (whose cupboard is quite bare).
Interesting that most of what I used to learn about baseball prospects was from podcasts, many of which didn’t survive Covid or have been overrun with gambling talk.
I do often keep MLB network on in the background so maybe I’ll pick up some names from osmosis.
Has ESPN managed to still make the Home Run Derby as unwatchable as can be? Last time we remember watching was when it was dragged out to over three hours (ok, dragged on way too long)
Watching baseball on TV or streaming is where MLB just simply utterly fails. It is way too hard find where you can watch a game. (Much hilarity ensued when we tried to watch a recent Dodgers game.) But trying to watch minor league is even harder. It’s like they’d rather have kids watch TikTok than baseball. Add in the cost of going to a game and it feels like they want to turn baseball into a grandpa sport.
Mariners drafted a high school kid. I figure if we’re lucky, we might see him in 5 years on a MLB field.
You’re right, there’s no way to be excited for people you’ve never heard of and might not hear again for a long time. But baseball has its own version of that sort of thing; when a player who has developed in the minors for a while is ready to debut in the majors, that’s the equivalent of the draft in other sports. You basically never get excited in the NFL when a practice squad guy makes the roster, because if he was a better player he shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But in baseball, elevating a talented and promising rookie can be a huge deal with a lot of hype and excitement.
I remember how excited I was seeing Stephen Strasburg tear through the minor leagues with a passion, with a vengeance. Then he came to the majors and had a brilliant performance in his debut. A few years later, he was the World Series MVP. (I’m not saying there haven’t been ups and downs.)
MiLB.tv is going to have pretty much anything that is broadcast, if you’re willing to pay the subscription cost.
Well, at least it’s all in one place. But minor league streaming should be a marketing expense, not a revenue generator.
I’ve been surprised that minor league games haven’t filled more of the empty hours on the various sports cable networks. It’s got to be fairly cheap programming and would give something to show. That way, they can leave the old retrospective shows for the off season.
The Cubs network shows the occasional minor league game when the Cubs are off or had a day game. But, they don’t really cover the minors in detail when they’ve got 24 hours of programming to fill
Unless the minor league games are already being covered by a local TV crew (in which case, you’d only be picking up an already-existing broadcast) I’m not sure how cheap it would be. You’d need to send several cameras, a video production truck, and an announcing team to the game, and that is likely to be substantially more expensive than re-running old games or whatever else the cable sports channels are running.
I was under the impression that most teams have their own equipment at the park (at least in AA and AAA), and they’d likely have crew to run it. At the worst, they could do the announcing from the network studio, like when anti-vaxxer John Smoltz has to play by himself in the booth.
The MLB.tv app runs the occasional minor league game, usually when there’s something happening of note. (But actually, I think they do it to draw attention to the mere existence of MiLB.tv.)
I’ve been meaning to ask this question for awhile. For MLB games, which are typically broadcast by a home crew and a visiting crew, do they have two sets of cameras or do they share? It doesn’t seem practical to have two center field cameras on each pitch, for example, but maybe they do.
I’ve learned something today. MiLB.tv indicates that they carry home games from every AAA and AA team.
At least where I live, if you want to watch a minor league game, you just go watch it in-person. Tickets are really cheap and there are so many teams nearby that it’s not too much of a hardship to travel there.
That might not be the case everywhere I suppose.
Funny, I have the opposite problem, I can walk to Wrigley and easily take the Red Line to Comiskey, but there’s no minor league teams nearby without a decent drive, I think South Bend is the closest.
There are several that are closer (though I think that none of them are MLB-affiliated):
Kane County Cougars (Geneva)
Chicago Dogs (Rosemont) – their stadium is right on I-294, just east of O’Hare
Windy City ThunderBolts (Crestwood)
Joliet Slammers
Schaumberg Boomers
Gary SouthShore Railcats
So pretty much every game? Every away game is a home game for the other team.
The Texas Rangers stunned the draft room when they took Kumar Rocker yesterday with the #3 pick in the draft. Rocker was a dominant SP for Vanderbilt, was drafted by the Mets last year, but didn’t sign with them (with no real indication why). He spent the last year playing in the independent Pioneer League. He was projected to be a late first round pick this year.
Today, the Rangers selected high school arm Brock Porter, who has been consistently ranked in the top 15 of the class, but hadn’t been drafted because he is a very strong commit to Clemson. But…the Rangers are going to save a bunch of money signing Rocker, since he went so much higher than expected, and they can use that extra cash to try to entice Porter to go pro instead of to college.
It’s interesting inside-baseball stuff, but I really don’t like it. It feels just a little bit below board to be able to influence the outcome of the draft with money, and removes some of the parity a draft tries to instill in the first place.