Amateur Draft

This one is for the newbies. The amateur draft is coming soon and you may want to take this time now to get an idea of how it works. Okay, so the prospect pool doesn't arrive til the 20th and the actual draft will be held on the morning of the 27th, Christmas Day as we call it.

To begin with it is always a good idea to know where you draft especially in the first round. To do that you go to GM's Office - Player Development - Amateur Draft Order. The big thing here is the sandwich picks, those identified with a 1*, they are not in order as of yet, not until the 20th. They will be reordered by type on that day, looks like the Mets will move up to the 34th position. If you are in the top 16, you should get a very good player to help the future of your club, if you do your home work.

Next thing to look at is the Amateur Draft Settings and take the time to understand what they do. All the help is on the right side of the page for any section, sometimes it is clear as mud. If you don't understand, ASK for help!. The formula builder is a helpful tool but not exactly a necessity to use. It will be a little awkward at first until you get the hang of what it does. Of course you can't use it til the prospects show up on the morning of the 20th.

If you are wondering about what it is going to cost you, look at last years draft by clicking on World Office-Reports-Draft History. You will need to change the season to 22. If you look at the second player drafted, you will notice an unusually high amount was paid. He must have had signability issues that caused that. Not sure if he was worth that much in my books. Normally they start out at $4M and gradually decrease in value from there. Oh and Shafty, I know last years owner didn't sign most of the upper picks, think he ran out of money. But the first round pick wasn't worth it as my draft review in January will tell you, he was a late first rounder to supp pick at best. The others I don't know about but probably should have been signed anyway.

Once the prospects are in place the morning of the 20th, you have seven days to finalize the order before the draft. It can be a pains taking task by the way, so make sure you allot plenty of time. I usually only mess with the top 100, umm yeah, there will be at least 500 in the pool on your board. No team will see every player either.

Things to watch out for. Scouts lie is the first thing to note. All players have current ratings that everyone sees them the same. The projected ratings is what we call a little fuzzy. One owner may see the projected ratings one way while another sees them another even with the same money spent on scouting. Be careful of health ratings. Also if the difference between a current rating to a projected rating is 30 or more, chances are he will never attain it or even get close for that matter. 20 to 25 is attainable under ideal situations.

One other thing to note, the rookie league will start a few days after the draft. It has a roster size of 30, of those 16 should be pitchers to be on the safe side. Out of those 16, 10 or so should be in stater territory. You don't have to sign all your picks immediately either. I have a carry over rookie roster, I sign the best picks then leave the rest til the end of the season. At the end of the season I promote players that can be decent career minor leaguers and leave the rest then sign the remainder of the draft picks for next season.