Kobe Bryant is chasing his fifth championship with the Los
Angeles Lakers — the only NBA team he has played for.
It’s not the one that drafted him, though.
John Elway is as much a part of Denver as the Rocky Mountains;
he was originally picked by the Colts.
These little-remembered and short-lived careers — virtually
nonexistent, actually — pop up every year around draft time, when a
team owns a player’s rights barely long enough for him to put on a
ballcap and shake hands with the commissioner.
But not in baseball.
The Washington Nationals have the first pick in Monday’s draft,
and unless they’re scared away by his salary demands, they are
expected to take junior college catcher Bryce Harper.
There’s one thing they can’t do: trade the pick.
Unlike their counterparts in other major pro sports, baseball
teams cannot trade draft picks or even trade players for a year
after they were drafted, like the Charlotte Hornets did shortly
after picking Bryant or the Colts did with Elway. The rule is
supposed to keep struggling teams from frittering away their ticket
out of the cellar, but concerns that it might be hurting those it’s
designed to help have many asking whether it’s time to finally lift
the ban.
“I have always been in favor of trading draft picks,” former San
Diego Padres general manager Kevin Towers, now a special assignment
scout for the New York Yankees, wrote in an e-mail. “I think it
would make the baseball draft much more interesting, as well as
allowing small- to mid-market teams more flexibility and a chance
to be creative.”
With players that are largely considered interchangeable — a
slugger doesn’t have to fit into a scheme, like an offensive
lineman or power forward — baseball has the most active trade
market in sports. It runs from the winter “hot stove league” to the
hype and rumors of the midsummer trade deadline that, for teams
already out of the running, can be more exciting than the pennant
race.
But while football, basketball and hockey teams can package
players and picks to land a coveted star, move up in the draft
order or even compensate another team for poaching its coach,
baseball limits the market to current players and prospects so
losing teams can’t sell off their future along with their
present.
“Could allowing trading picks help certain teams? Sure, it
could,” Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein said last week as he
prepared for the 50-round draft, in which about 1,500 players will
be distributed over three days.
“There are a lot of positives that could come from it, and then
there’s some potential danger that I know traditionally Major
League Baseball has been worried about. It could hurt (teams) in
the long run, because they’d be tempted to help themselves now, or
they wouldn’t want to spend the money on the draft picks so they
trade them. It’s a balancing act.”
It’s true: Other sports are littered with examples of teams that
were hamstrung for years after trading away draft choices.
But for each of them there’s also a team that accelerated its
turnaround by making a shrewd move for a player who, at the time,
was just a draft number.
The Boston Celtics got Robert Parish and the pick that became
Kevin McHale from Golden State for the No. 1 overall pick in the
1980 draft; the pair joined with Larry Bird to win three NBA
titles. The Dallas Cowboys went from 1-15 to a three-time Super
Bowl champion in the ’90s by sending Herschel Walker to Minnesota
in a package that grew to 18 players and picks (one of them became
Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith).
And it’s not like baseball teams haven’t made some pretty bad
deals, even without trading draft choices. After all, the Yankees
didn’t need to throw in any draft picks — just a bundle of cash —
when they took Babe Ruth off the Red Sox’s hands in 1920.
“I cannot think of any good reason why MLB would have such a
rule, unless it is worried that the teams with the highest picks
are not capable of making good decisions,” said Richard Thaler, a
behavioral economist from the University of Chicago’s Booth School
of Business who has studied the NFL draft. “… It has to help the
teams with the top picks to have the option of trading them for
additional picks.”
Consider also that the teams at the top of the draft are usually
there because they are in small markets, which also makes it
difficult for them to afford the signing bonuses the top prospects
demand.
Towers’ Padres lost 98 games in 2003 and owned the No. 1 overall
pick in the ’04 draft, which included can’t-miss shortstop Stephen
Drew. Teams were leery of Drew, whose brother J.D. was the No. 2
overall pick in 1997 and went unsigned after demanding nearly $10
million from Philadelphia as a signing bonus. (The older Drew went
back into the draft pool and was taken by St. Louis fifth overall
the next year.)
The Padres would gladly have traded the No. 1 pick for several
lower selections, as football teams frequently do.
“Often, rebuilding organizations need multiple players to
jump-start their organizations, rather than one elite prospect (and
remember they are still prospects, not proven major-league talent
yet),” Towers wrote. “Gaining multiple picks in a draft that they
may deem strong, with depth, might be the best way to get back to
becoming competitive again sooner.”
The Padres wound up passing on both Drew and pitcher Jered
Weaver — another highly rated prospect being advised by agent Scott
Boras — and took high school shortstop Matt Bush.
Bush has been with three organizations, and has yet to make it
to the majors.
“In 2004, our farm system was void of great talent,” Towers
wrote. “Gaining multiple picks that year most likely would have
been of great interest to us.”
___
AP Sports Writers Larry Lage in Detroit, Bernie Wilson in San
Diego and Dennis Waszak Jr. in New York contributed to this
story.
