Going Deep: Rule 5 draft overhyped

03/06/2006
Baseball fans bemoan the neglect that their sport's amateur draft gets each summer, particularly in comparison with the football and basketball versions, which are covered wall to wall on television and radio and have put people like Mel Kiper Jr. on a path to getting their own reality shows.
While the NFL and NBA drafts are typified by thousand-dollar suits, photo-op handshakes, capacity crowds, and millions of dollars in sponsorship, baseball's summer draft is conducted over a conference call, one that only in the last few years has been accessible to fans in real time, over the Internet.
As relatively overlooked as baseball's summer draft is, the Rule 5 draft held each December is, frankly, probably overhyped. Thousands of baseball executives and reporters pack themselves into a huge auditorium for the draft, but for most it's probably only because it's the final official event of baseball's Winter Meetings. The teams that choose to participate call out the names of a handful of players with several years of service who fit an odd category: not considered worthy of a 40-man roster spot by their own organization, but thought by another club to be worth devoting not only a 40-man spot to but also one of the precious spots on the 25-man active roster -- for the entire season.
While up to 1,500 players from the high school and college ranks are chosen each year in the summer draft (codified under Rule 4 of the Major League Rules), the big league phase of the Rule 5 draft generally involves only 10 to 20 players. Fewer than half survive spring training and stick with their new clubs. And in a good year, a mere one or two of those players will turn out to make a meaningful contribution.
The most prominent players drafted via Rule 5 in the last 10 years are Johan Santana, Jay Gibbons, Derrick Turnbow, Chris Shelton, Jorge Sosa, and Willy Taveras -- and Turnbow and Sosa didn't emerge until they were traded later to yet another club.
To put Rule 5 in layman's terms, a player must be protected on his team's 40-man roster in the winter following his fourth season since signing his first professional contract if he was 18 or younger on the June 5 immediately preceding his signing date, or in the winter following his third season since signing if he was at least 19 on the June 5 immediately before he signed. If he's not so protected, says Rule 5, he's eligible to be drafted.
In the major league phase of the draft, which is conducted in reverse order of the previous season's win-loss records, a club must pay $50,000 to the draft pick's original team, and the player must remain on its active major league roster (or major league disabled list) for the entire ensuing season or be placed on waivers, making him available to every other big league club willing to take on the same constraints. If the player clears waivers, he must be offered back to his original team for $25,000.
Trades are worked out occasionally so that the drafting club can keep the player in its farm system instead of keeping him in the big leagues all year or giving him back to his original team. But the key here -- and this nuance is regularly misunderstood by the press -- is that the player has to clear waivers before a trade can be made. If the player is placed on waivers during March and clears, and the drafting club wants to keep him but just not on the big league roster, it may offer the original team a player for the right to keep the Rule 5 pick and assign him to the minor leagues.
Texas traded minor leaguers whose names you probably wouldn't recognize in order to keep Mitch Williams (1984), Cecil Espy (1987), and Marshall McDougall (2002) in the minor leagues.
The first player chosen in this past December's draft was diminutive lefthander Fabio Castro, a 20-year-old (now 21) who has yet to pitch above Class A in four pro seasons. The White Sox left him unprotected, and Kansas City prearranged a deal with the Rangers by which the Royals would choose Castro and send him to Texas for infielder Esteban German.
Texas would like to see Castro, who has logged 10 strikeouts per nine innings over his career, earn a spot in its bullpen, but just because he was the first player selected is no guarantee that he'll make the pick pay off: the previous seven top choices were the largely forgettable Alberto Blanco, Jared Camp, Scott Chiasson, Kevin McGlinchy, Enrique Cruz, Shelton, and Angel Garcia.
The reason so few impact players come out of the Rule 5 draft is basically that most organizations, after three or four seasons, know enough about their own players to recognize whether they deserve addition to the 40-man roster. Houston will always regret not finding room on the 40-man for Santana after his first four seasons (like Castro, none above Class A), but that's the rare case. Sometimes teams simply get outscouted on their own prospects; other times, as with Toronto and Gibbons in 2000, the team who leaves the player exposed probably figures he doesn't run well enough or defend well enough or throw enough strikes to actually stick in the big leagues all year as a role player.
But more often than not, the players left unprotected are players who won't become impact major leaguers. Still, every once in a while, a player like Santana or Shelton -- and, Texas hopes, maybe even Castro -- makes one team's decision to expose him look awful, makes another team's decision to choose him look genius, and gives us all a reason to pay more attention to the next Rule 5 draft than we realistically should.

Source: http://texas.rangers.mlb.com/