MLB Muffs the Minors at the 2007 Rule 5 Draft
MAJOR BLOGS - www.majorblogs.net - The MLB Rule 5 Draft went off with a hitch. Two of them, actually. Well, let's be fair: Three. Sure, 99% of the people in the room could care less, but you and I have a passion for the minor league side of the sport, so we can get a good chuckle over being dissed by MLB.com yet again.
The Rule 5 is broken up into three "phases" with their own sets of rounds. There is a Major League phase, a Triple-A phase, and a Double-A phase.
When they do the minor league phases, the teams represented are the minor league clubs, with the names of their parent attached on the side. Nice? Not.
Most of this is old custom, much the same as why some religions have dietary laws, there are two parties in America, or people bless you when you sneeze.
Still, as long as you're going for the custom, it might be nice to get it right.
To our dear friends at MLB.com, who produced the event and all of the graphics and database of players, we offer this news flash: There is no more Ottawa Lynx. They're the Lehigh Valley IronPigs. A mere triviality to the .com-ers, but I would bet that the new Penna porkers would be squealing over the slight if they knew. After all, they've only spent two years relentlessly marketing their grand opening this year. Maybe you guys missed those daily press releases?
What was boo-boo number two? The Wichita Wranglers... Somehow you seemed to have also missed that they moved. Those forwarding kits are sooo unreliable. Or it ended up on the desk of the MilB.com guy who keeps daydreaming about his shot to move up to the big league media office and leave his life of minor league squalor behind. Anyway, the Wranglers packed up and moved in the off-season: They're the North Arkansas Naturals now. Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore...
For an organization that is trying to convince all of the member clubs of MiLB to jump on board with the MiLB.com experience, such faux pas are really inexcusable.
One expects that the Major League Baseball league office people who put together Rule 4 tmay be a bit clueless to club names, because there is a lot of fluidity at the minor league level and it is not always in their face. The whole shebang was televisied on MLB.com, though, which means someone in the dozens of people that work for that crack production staff that produced the show should have caught it for them.
Those were the two... The third? Ah... Well, one of the things that is interesting about the draft is that the minor league clubs really don't make a call, pull the trigger on that draft prospect.
When man at the podium goes to see what's happening at the team tables, of course, he calls out to the Giants rather than the Fresno Grizzlies.... Wouldn't it be cool, though, since they bother to use the names in the draft, if they let the PR guy or the GM from the clubs included in the draft stand up and say:
"The Fresno Grizzlies select Juan Jose de la Hoya Medillo Pedilla of the Midland Rockhounds. Thats J-U-A-N..."
THAT would be a big attaboy for bringing 11 million new fans into baseball over the last decade. Instead, they are ignored, as are the last two phases of the draft by many in the room. The noise level definitely went up in the peanut gallery while the Bowie BaySox were bagging Jon Martinez from the Fort Myers Miracle. Imagine the extra eyeballs tuning into MLB.com if all of the clubs were sending out press releases to their local markets touting that one of their own from the home town market will be making the call, and advertising the MLB.com program's airing.
If MLB.com wants to be ESPN when it grows up, it had best make sure that all of the spit and polish is on the show if this is programming for the minor league fans consumption. You may not know the difference between Lehigh Valley and Ottawa, but I think Ottawans do, eh?
Brian Ross
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