Baseball Draft Loses Another Quirk
| By Will Lingo |
| June 12, 2007 |
Many of Baseball America's readers actually work in baseball, and those who don't like to feel like they know more about the game than other baseball fans.
And for the last 20 years, nothing could make you feel more like an "insider" than knowing what the heck someone meant when they talked about draft-and-follows.
The draft-and-follow process—also referred to as DFE (draft, follow and evaluate) or DNF—is one of the things that almost no one understands when they start working at BA, right up there with the Rule 5 draft. Over the years, when a mysterious junior-college player signs for six or seven figures a week before the draft, you figured it out.
Draft-and-follows were like Rule 5 picks in another way: The hype never seemed to live up to the reality. Like the Rule 5, draft-and-follow supporters can point to iconic success stories like Roy Oswalt and Travis Hafner. But also like the Rule 5, fans tend to forget the many players signed each year who never do anything.
That's not unlike the draft itself, where finding a couple of major leaguers out of 50 selections is a cause for celebration. But in an era when Major League Baseball is looking for places to save money, getting rid of the draft-and-follow process seemed inevitable.
Evolution And Revolution
It's just a quirk of timing that the end of the draft-and-follow era comes 20 years after it began, but those two dates will become prominent on the timeline of draft history—whenever we get around to writing it.
The 1987 draft was the first that compressed the entire process into one group of selections. High school, college and junior-college players used to be separated into January and June drafts, and even into regular and secondary phases.
The 1987 draft was the first to streamline the process, which scouting directors welcomed. But they also recognized what could be ahead. The "draft-and-follow" label had not yet been concocted, but it didn't take teams long to figure out the potential benefit of being able to control an amateur player's rights for almost a year.
We wrote on the eve of the 1987 draft: "It's anticipated that a number of clubs will continue drafting high school players long after the normal selection process is complete," and several scouting directors welcomed the extra time to evaluate players.
"If you know a player is going to junior college and is not quite ready for pro ball, you can take a chance on him," said Terry Ryan, then the Twins' scouting director. "It's a great opportunity not to make a premature judgment."
The 1987 draft did set a record, with 1,263 players drafted and the Royals continuing to pick into the 74th round. And the real draft-and-follow fever was still to come.
Latching Onto Success Stories
Darryl Kile was an immediate success story out of the 1987 draft. A virtually unknown two-way player out of Chaffey (Calif.) Junior College, he went to the Astros in the 30th round and signed the next May.
Kile went on to win 133 major league games in 12 seasons, with three all-star appearances, before dying suddenly in 2002 due to a heart ailment. While his life and career came to an untimely end, he will forever be regarded as the patron saint of the draft-and-follow process, the player who helped popularize it.
The next big moment in draft-and-follow history came in 1991, when Frank Rodriguez signed as a draft-and-follow with the Red Sox for $425,000—back when that was a lot of money. And the draft-and-follow bonus record came in 2003, when Adam Loewen signed with the Orioles for a $3.2 million bonus as part of a major league contract.
But both of those players were premium picks the year before who simply used the draft-and-follow route to extend their negotiating windows. The real draft-and-follows were the late-round picks, like Kile and Oswalt, who developed into something much more.
"The draft-and-follow is a true area scout's draft," Cubs general manager Jim Hendry told BA a few years ago. "Scouting has become so crosscheck-oriented that a DFE is the area guy's only real chance to project players and use his skills at cultivating relationships with the players. I'm a big believer in the process for that reason alone, though I know many scouts aren't."
So while it might make sense from an accounting perspective, the people on the front lines see the end of the draft-and-follow process as another blow to old-fashioned scouting.
"This is a tremendous lose-lose-lose in a lot of different avenues there," Cubs scouting director Tim Wilken said. "(MLB officials) don't have the foresight to see down the road, they have no idea. They have no comprehension of the man hours that are spent, not only by the scouts but the juco coaches, everyone in the industry, trying to make sure the DNF process is beneficial and useful."
The process definitely had its ups and downs over the years—probably more downs—and in the future you'll be even cooler if you can harken back to the good ol' days, when draft-and-follows roamed the earth.
You can contact Will Lingo by sending e-mail to willlingo@baseballamerica.com.