Today, as I start writing this, is Wednesday. There is no baseball game tonight, tomorrow there will also be no baseball game. Last Saturday, 30 major league teams and over 100 minor league teams played baseball. In the middle of that afternoon, MLB played its Futures Game. An event that it hypes only a little, jams in front of the Celebrity Softball Game, and is all around mostly a way for certain individuals working for the handful of websites covering the minor leagues to make some snap judgements about players. This is unfair, almost all of them do great work, but they appear to actually be the only consistent audience for the game as one has to buy a ticket to the Softball game to attend the Futures Game.
Then on Sunday, no event occurred except to select the careers of some amateur baseball players in a place where appropriately cattle are auctioned off. Before the event could begin, HS RHP William Schmidt announced he was going to LSU and did not want to be drafted and Keith Law of The Athletic decided to woe is the scouts about the teenager deciding to exercise some of the precious little control he had about his career after seeing where multi billion dollar companies might offer him in employment.
MLB continues to try and make the draft a THING. The MLB draft is a THING, but not the public. It is a huge deal for teams and for the players and their families. Teams spend an enormous amount of time and resources on the draft (and are now forced to that 2 weeks from the trade deadline, a move that continues to make no sense and no one likes). For players, this often a thing they have spent most of their lives dreaming of, and it can be life changing money for them and the chance to eventually fully fulfill their dreams.
For the public, which no offense to Michael Baumann, does not watch or care about college baseball and especially does not care about college baseball, the players are unrecognizable. Not only do they not know who they are, they won’t see most of them on their favorite team for years, if they make it. Outside the top of the draft, many of these players won’t even begin their careers in a notable spot on a prospect list. To make matters worse, in an effort to restrict spending below the cost of a single year of Whit Merrifield, the baseball draft slotting system creates an environment where the draft is a math puzzle, not a place of celebrating talent. League coverage and sites try to act like teams are taking players in a talent order when it is an elaborate scheme of underpaying some to overpay others and make it all fit into some neat little numbers so Bob Nutting and Jerry Reinsdorf can count a few more coins in their vault.
This is especially egregious when we get to the draft’s second day, a place where only sickos dwell. A quick success of picks and quips by MLB’s analysis has you desperately trying to figure out if your team is having a good day or not as they ping around the board, before we get to the 7th round where the real mockery of the draft occurs. Teams now begin to take college seniors, many of who are talented players, and squeeze them down to $10,000 bonuses when they could just wait until day 3 and pay them up to $150,000 without affecting any of their plans. Suddenly any idea of teams taking players they best think will help them goes out the door as a player’s worth becomes how desperate he is to be drafted and take an insult of a signing bonus from a team. You can argue with the pools the players make the same total pot of money, and you would be true, but the system and power dynamics create a coercive atmosphere for much of Monday afternoon. Tuesday is a rapid fire conference call where everyone is desperately searching for information about players going to schools they didn’t know existed. All of incredibly difficult work by baseball scouts and analysts to find and evaluate these players and teams to figure out if they can draw the talent from them.
The whole process is actually known and enjoyed by a small inner circle who will then speak down to the masses whether their team did well in the math challenge and if they had a good draft. The whole process a mockery of MLB trying to make something happen at the very beginning and then rapidly deciding they don’t actually give a shit and chucking it to the side.
Which brings us to Wednesday, a day without baseball. Rather than showcase the prospects and give them a day in the sun, we instead get nothing. We could integrate those players into the home run derby, interact with the big leaguers, even just be around when all of the team beat writers are actually in town and not still doing their primary job covering their major league team. We know that MLB treats amateurs and minor leaguers as second class citizens to be exploited. That was obvious when they gutted their player development arm by cutting rounds off the draft, minor league teams, and minor league jobs to appease the opinion of McKinsey brain poisoned individuals running the Astros. MLB has never really given much thought to its own product, what is actually good for the game, good for players, and good for fans. This all without touching that the game was held in the lifeless farm equipment wholesale warehouse of the only team in baseball that doesn’t have a Pride Night, but in the words of Rob Manfred that “it’s really important here to remember there’s a massive public investment in terms of creating a great facility. And honestly, that’s an important consideration in terms of awarding All-Star Games.”
This isn’t related to All Star Week, but the distribution of games on different streaming services without a care to the fan is F*@king ignorant and disrespectful. MLB needs to stop pretending they care about the fans. They don’t. Individual clubs sure they need the revenue. But Manfred and his goons couldn’t care less. It’s infuriating.
Every word true. It’s hard to imagine what they could do to make the Futures Game, an inherently cool event, less of a celebration. MLB’s approach begs the question of why they have it all. I suppose a cynical person might conclude they want to have a record of doing something, while avoiding the scrutiny of their related practices that stronger promotion might invite.
As always, I appreciate your coverage and value your insights and analysis.
The Futures Game has infuriated me the last few years, from not being on MLB network to having it on Sat. Matt your points are so spot on that of course there’s no way MLB will think about it. The worst sports day of the year is the Wed after the all star game. That is the day to play and properly promote the Futures game.