Should baseball teams be able to TRADE draft choices?

The real reason the MLB draft is boring is that most of the players drafted will not be playing in the bigs for a long time, many of them never.

 

I don't think allowing trades of draft choices is the answer though. Baseball has the luxury of a gigantic farm system. You will occasionally see an NBA draftee shipped off to Europe, but most go right to their team. I think that the way the system is set up, there is no way to make an exciting baseball draft.

 

Trading draft choices will not make a draft exciting. Only the people that know these high school and college players would watch a televised draft.

If they were to somehow have a skills contest on TV matching up the best pitchers with the best hitters, the best fastball contest or the most accurate OF arm - kind of like a televised combine, then maybe more attention might be shown to the baseball draft. But such a "NFL Quarterback Challenge" type of event will never happen.

Anyway, the system that allows a team losing a free agent to get the pick from the team signing that free agent is something that seems like a fair thing. The Astros ended up losing their 22nd overall pick to the Giants for Kent. The Giants also received a supplemental pick at 34 overall for their lose.

The draft is full of people that even consistent baseball fans have never heard of. High school baseball games are not televised when a certain stud is pitching, like ESPN did for LBJ. Only the College World Series gets major television time as far as I know.

If the players could become more hyped and interesting to fans, then a televised draft might become a good idea.

 

Anything can be exciting if you turn it into an event. All you need to do is make it entertaining. And a baseball draft can be entertainnig as evidence by the NFL and NBA. That's exactly what baseball needs. They need to market their young players so that when they make it we know who they are. But baseball is starting from scratch. They need to market something. Anything. And then go from there.

I am almost willing to guarantee that if the baseball draft was put on prime time like an Nba draft, right now, people would watch.