ESPN Buster Olney Blog

When the "Baseball Tonight" producers turned the mikes on for Keith Law and Aaron Fitt of Baseball America on Tuesday night and asked them about possible winners and losers in the MLB draft, they noted some of the possible steals made in the first round -- the Rockies' selecting Tyler Matzek at No. 11, the Royals' taking Aaron Crow at No. 12, the Rangers' selecting left-hander Matt Purke at No. 14 and the Tigers' picking Jacob Turner at No. 9.

Kudos to those teams. But here's the thing: All of the teams picking in front of the Rockies, Royals, Rangers and Tigers know how good those guys are, just as the Padres recognized how good Justin Verlander might be when they passed on him and picked Matt Bush. The Royals understood the talent of Matt Wieters and Evan Longoria when they bypassed those two players in consecutive years. And all of the club officials from 26 teams who gritted their teeth and declined to take Rick Porcello before he landed with Detroit with the 27th pick in 2007 realized that there would probably be a day when he realized his great potential. Most baseball executives are not blind; evaluating talent is what they do for a living and they all saw great things in Porcello.

This is the problem with baseball's draft, in a nutshell, a problem that many general managers want to fix during the next collective bargaining negotiation. They want the worst teams to be able to take the best players in the draft, rather than the most affordable good players. Or, they want the worst teams to at least be able to have a chance to realize the value of their draft position -- so if the Mariners didn't want to pay Dustin Ackley's demands, expected to be in the range of $6.5 million, they could at least trade that pick to another team for other assets.

But, as it stands, the Pirates wound up taking catcher Tony Sanchez because they won't have to pay him that much and because it freed up other money for them to sign their other draft picks. Sanchez might turn out to be a decent player, but he is generally not perceived to be among the four best players in this year's draft, so Pittsburgh lost out on the value of the No. 4 overall pick. They reached to get Sanchez, Chuck Finder writes.

There are a lot of suggestions from a lot of smart people on how to fix the draft system, and there could be sentiment on the union side to address this as well -- a slotting system tied to baseball's overall revenues might free up more money for veteran players, who have seen their portion of the money pie shrink steadily over the past 12 months.

"There isn't much margin for error for the small-market teams to win, and the draft is the best way for those teams to get better," one GM said recently. "But if they don't have access to the best players because of the way the draft is messed up, how are they really going to have a chance to compete?"

That's a question that will be raised over and over before the next labor negotiation.

Draft Notes

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