OU Won. MLB Approves.
Owners want college ball to be their development system
Under the latest contract proposal from MLB’s owners to its players, the NCAA baseball championship that concluded Monday night would look a lot like it actually just did: a development tool for the pros.
That appearance had something to do, certainly, with the fact that the two conferences represented, the SEC (Oklahoma) and ACC (North Carolina), are already basically feeder programs to the 30 teams that comprise Major League Baseball.
And although the Sooners relied heavily on three freshman pitchers to take them on a Cinderella run to the title, the larger truth is that NCAA programs regularly do a fine job of taking a couple of years to turn out pro-ready baseball players, with a future-grade predictability factor that high-school athletes could never possess.
So it’s probably no surprise that the owners want to abolish the high-school draft. That’s part of their most recent proposal: Trim the domestic draft from 20 rounds down to 12 (it was 40 rounds as recently as 2019), cut out high-school players altogether, and reduce the domestic signing-bonus pool from $400 million to about $200 million.
Not saying that’ll fly; negotiations go on and on. But this is a pretty clear indicator that from the owners’ side of the table, the idea of using college baseball as the development tool of choice makes more sense now than ever.
That’s a trend, by the way. The proportion of college draftees in MLB’s minor leagues (versus high school drafts) has been rising pretty steadily. One obvious reason is that once MLB’s owners took over the minor league system a few years ago, the first thing they did was kill 25% of their affiliated teams, all of them at the lower levels of player development, all of them costing money to run.
Their reasoning: Why bother? Now that college athletics has shifted to a power model, with three or four conferences likely to hoover up all of the premier high school talent in almost any sport, it’s far more cost-effective to let the NCAA train the talent.
There’s no question that the power conferences already function as pro developers. Even in baseball, which is a revenue-losing sport for most universities, head coaches can bag seven-figure paydays for running championship-caliber programs. By nature, that implies a professional approach to both training and development, the better to recruit talent that otherwise might head straight for the minor leagues.
What MLB wants is for those college players to now be available to the pros after their sophomore seasons, rather than after their junior seasons as it currently stands. No more “age 21” requirement; just put in two years at the NCAA training level and then come on up.
There are plenty of concerns about all this from pro front-office types and scouts, chief among them that they’d rather get a really promising talent in their systems sooner rather than later. Historically, that has meant drafting a high-value target right out of high school, so that a team could train him its way and not the way some college coach thinks the kid should be developed or deployed.
But high-round prep signings cost extra money (because you’re trying to buy out the years that players could choose to play in college instead), and they’re risky. And in case you forgot that it’s the owners who want to change the system, here is the other factor: The sooner an elite player becomes a professional, the sooner he gets on track toward a monster contract.
ESPN had this nugget: Of the 12 largest contract signings in the history of Major League Baseball, exactly one went to a player who came from a four-year college program, Aaron Judge (Fresno State). The rest were young-guy signings, either high school or foreign-born. Teams pay these mega-contracts but hate themselves for doing so, in which case, blame the system.
In Monday night’s runaway 13-2 title-clinching win, one of Oklahoma’s stars was Jaxon Willits, who was also honored as the College World Series’ Most Outstanding Player. A college junior, Willits should receive a good MLB draft, somewhere in the top 150 players or so.
Just last summer, Jaxon’s little brother, Eli, signed for $8.2 million with the Washington Nationals as the No. 1 overall draft pick — right out of high school. Of the two Willits brothers, that is, Eli is perceived to have the much higher ceiling as a pro. On the other hand, the risk that Eli falls short of the expectations of a 1/1 draft pick is far, far greater than taking Jaxon in, say, Round 4, and relying on his solid college pedigree with the Sooners to establish a very credible pro floor.
In these early contract negotiations, at least, MLB’s owners seem to prefer the latter formula. Even if college ball lowers some players’ ceilings, their floors will be easier to predict, and they’ll cost less overall. I’m not sure fans will ever print that on a T-shirt, but, you know, business.
Very interesting column Mark. Sounds similar to the approach of college basketball with coaches not offering as many HS scholarships but opting for the portal for players who have played 1-3 years against college competition.