A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

ONTO-LOOGY: For a baseball fan who roots for a chronically bad-to-mediocre team, there are few days that occasion as much hope as those of the amateur draft, which kicked off yesterday afternoon. "Give us a teenager, or perhaps a 21-year-old," we say, "that we may invest in him the expectation that he will deliver to us the fulfillment and contentment that have eluded us in our miserable lives." But it's also unsatisfying, because, unlike in the NFL or NBA draft (usually), you have no frame of reference. Consider what even a pretty well-informed (but not obsessive) fan doesn't know:

• We don't know most of these players
• We've never seen any of them play an actual baseball game
• Of those whose names we know, we don't know anything about them other than what we've read in the two-paragraph summaries we read on baseball web sites
• We don't know if they're injured
• We don't know if they're injury-prone
• We don't know what makes a baseball player injury-prone
• If they're in high school, we don't know if they're going to go to college
• We don't know how crazy much money Scott Boras is going to demand on their behalf to avoid college or even just because he can
• We don't know if they have the kind of skills that translate when measured against better competition
• We don't know what kind of skills translate when measured against better competition
• We don't know if they'll be better than the international players our teams sign outside the draft context
• We don't know what needs our teams will have two or four years down the road when they're hopefully good enough to play in the major leagues
• We don't know if they're ever going to be good enough to play in the major leagues
• We don't know if they're jerks or have plans to grow annoying facial hair or both (Bryce Harper)

It usually takes college players at least two years, and high school players at least four, to make it to the majors; it takes an additional couple of years for them to become meaningful contributors and a couple more for them to reach elite status. Better luck in 2020, Pirates and Mariners! In the mean time, remind me why I bother to follow this.