The Major League Baseball draft is unique.
And while hockey is the only other sport that has a similar style draft, in which players who are drafted aren’t immediately a member of the league that hosts the event, only baseball offers six and sometimes seven different levels of “minor leagues.”
The baseball draft is unique in yet another way. When targeting a draft selection, need is often the furthest thing from a scouting director’s mind. Drafting for need as a scouting director or GM can get you fired real quick.
This is a sharp contrast from football, where the worst teams in the NFL often look to a quarterback or defensive player who can step in immediately and make a difference.
In baseball, a team can draft a player and have him up to the majors in one to two years at the quickest in most cases. Other players, high-schoolers specifically, need anywhere from two to five years of seasoning.
Still, whereas drafting for need is most of the time the worst possible thing a team could do in baseball, it has served some teams well in the past few years (think the Nationals with Stephen Strasburg and the Orioles with Matt Wieters) and is starting to become something that is less and less silly thanks to the polished players that are being drafted out of the college ranks these days.
Taking that into account, let’s examine closely which teams could fill a great need in their farm system by taking a player in the first round.