MLB Draft 2010 - ChaseB's Blog

ChaseB's Blog

MLB Draft 2010

Posted on June 7, 2010 at 02:22 PM.

As a person who follows/writes/talks/obsesses about sports video games, it's not surprising to know that I am also in love with real sports. Tonight is a big night in the baseball world. While the MLB Draft is less popular than most of the other major drafts in the sports world, it only trails the NBA Draft in my book. In fact, it really reminds me of a scavenger hunt, and who doesn't love a good scavenger hunt?

If you follow the pre-draft coverage, then you probably know most of the first-round names, but there's not just one round in the MLB Draft, there are 50 rounds. That's a ton of names, and beyond just that, you won't even hear about most of these guys for years, if at all. On top of that, it's not like stats for many of these guys are readily available. You can easily find stats for the big-time college guys in the SEC or ACC, but it's a little harder to find stats on a prep pitcher who's pitching in Iowa. And even if you have the stats, so what? It's a draft, so you obviously are drafting someone based on projection more so than his stats in most cases. In the end, you run around to random Web site after random Web site, talk to random people on message boards who saw some prospect one time, and then you try to find some more solid and sound information at places like Baseball America.

So maybe it's an e-scavenger hunt, but it's a scavenger hunt nevertheless.

Now, my fondness for the Draft also led me to a side job this year. Andy Seiler is a one-man scouting machine, and this year he has released an MLB Draft Notebook that I had a chance to help edit. You can buy it at his site (here, just look on the left side for a link), and it will be e-mailed to you soon after. There will be updates to the Notebook in the coming days, weeks and months, and it's really an impressive guide to the Draft.

As of now, I am working with two other people to hammer out the edits to the 755 player profiles located in the Notebook. In other words, while the Notebook is live and fully functional, Andy is just one man, and he had to wait until it was closer to Draft time to finalize most of these player profiles. For that reason, Notebook version 1.0 is not final because there was just no way for three people to get through all 755 profiles in a span of a couple days and make sure everything was perfect.

However, version 1.0 is still a fantastic guide for those who want to follow the MLB Draft, and if you want to know about the guys your team has drafted, Andy Seiler's MLB Draft Notebook is something you have to buy.