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To be fair, (part of) the reason that affiliated baseball has 5000 players is the same as reason that the MLB draft has 40 rounds: the gap between high school /

To be fair, (part of) the reason that affiliated baseball has 5000 players is the same as reason that the MLB draft has 40 rounds: the gap between high school / college baseball and MLB is incredibly greater than the one between college basketball and the NBA. Power law phenomena in known skills at the long tail of a normal distribution are a red herring in this case; the much much bigger factor is uncertainty about the probability of developing skills years later (can a pitcher add a breaking ball that complements his fastball? will a hitter be able to track MLB curveballs thrown faster than 95% of the fastballs he's seen?). Draft position and prospect status are based on imperfect guesses at the shape of the very very very wide distribution of potential outcomes for an individual player with very little data to go on. The MLB draft is what what the NBA draft would be if they had to select 9th graders based on their performance at HORSE with a kickball on a 9 foot rim and a dunk contest on an 8 foot rim.

slg 7y ago
I would argue the difference between amateur and the top level professional baseball is so much wider than other sports just due to happenstance. MLB is older than the NCAA while the NBA and NFL are both younger than the NCAA. Therefore MLB needed to build up its own developmental leagues while the newer professional sports could rely on their college equivalents. Today almost every American born player in the NBA or NFL played in college while a whole lot of their MLB counterparts were drafted out of high school. That isn't due to some inherent difference in each sport or the ability of people to project forward a player's skill. It just the way the leagues happen to be setup. All that said, you are certainly right that a projection of a player's skill is inherently more difficult to make the earlier that prediction must be made.
- elgenie 7y ago
  The existence of the NCAA doesn't have anything to do with it. It is, however, somewhat of an accident of history that the MLB draft is of high schoolers as opposed to AA/AAA players. Before Branch Rickey pioneered the concept of "farm systems" in the late 1930s, a quarter century after the NCAA was established and around 75 years after the first collegiate baseball game, minor league teams weren't affiliated with MLB teams at all; instead, they were just other leagues with younger/worse players whose rights would be available to the highest bidder. The MLB draft to distribute talent didn't start until 1965, by which time all the teams had well-established farm systems via affiliations with minor league teams. The unpredictability of the gap in performance between high school and pro, though, is IMO larger than in football or basketball due to the fact that the core talents for making it in MLB are not based on pure run-fast-jump-high easy-to-measure athleticism, but rather on reactive skills that even if present in high school are not observable against meaningful competition.

slg 7y ago

I would argue the difference between amateur and the top level professional baseball is so much wider than other sports just due to happenstance. MLB is older than the NCAA while the NBA and NFL are both younger than the NCAA. Therefore MLB needed to build up its own developmental leagues while the newer professional sports could rely on their college equivalents. Today almost every American born player in the NBA or NFL played in college while a whole lot of their MLB counterparts were drafted out of high school. That isn't due to some inherent difference in each sport or the ability of people to project forward a player's skill. It just the way the leagues happen to be setup. All that said, you are certainly right that a projection of a player's skill is inherently more difficult to make the earlier that prediction must be made.

elgenie 7y ago
The existence of the NCAA doesn't have anything to do with it. It is, however, somewhat of an accident of history that the MLB draft is of high schoolers as opposed to AA/AAA players. Before Branch Rickey pioneered the concept of "farm systems" in the late 1930s, a quarter century after the NCAA was established and around 75 years after the first collegiate baseball game, minor league teams weren't affiliated with MLB teams at all; instead, they were just other leagues with younger/worse players whose rights would be available to the highest bidder. The MLB draft to distribute talent didn't start until 1965, by which time all the teams had well-established farm systems via affiliations with minor league teams. The unpredictability of the gap in performance between high school and pro, though, is IMO larger than in football or basketball due to the fact that the core talents for making it in MLB are not based on pure run-fast-jump-high easy-to-measure athleticism, but rather on reactive skills that even if present in high school are not observable against meaningful competition.