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2009 Draft Report
The results do not explain the process
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Where players come from
This page is about the results of the 2009 (and 2008) first-year MLB draft of eligible high school and college players. We aren't going to explain the entire process of how a player gets noticed or what it might mean for one state or region over another, or one country over another. (There are other pages which discuss that.) But there are some comments that need to be made... 1 Two-Year Snapshot
The numbers represent two year's worth of draft. For example Oregon and Minnesota each had 20 this year but 14 and 12 respectively last year. Wyoming had no picks this year or last but 3 in 2007. California went up from 260 in 2007 to 288 in 2008 to 292 in 2009 - apparently steady growth, but Oklahoma jumped from 19 to 48. In other words sometimes 2-3 years shows a trend but sometimes it's just a statistical anomaly. 2 Birth States Not always the best indication of where a player is really from or why he was chosen. For example, as you'd expect, many of the top states by numerical count are in the sun belt, but not all. There has to be something in the programs in Illinois and Washington and Ohio that generate such relatively high numbers of draftees. Or else more of these kids move while growing up. 3 School Factor Players chosen at younger ages tend to be more of a gamble than college players. For example, the remarkable results from Vanderbilt (22 picks from 2007 to 2009), clearly demonstrate that program's success, and you can expect more of those players to do well than those from a particular high school. Also, many of the foreign-born college-age players selected are scouted while playing at U.S. universities (the highest picked 2009 Canadian was at Kentucky). 4 Countries This may be the most misleading chart. Clearly the US is in the forefront, but the D.R. has surprisingly low numbers - considering the final percentage of MLB players who come from that island nation of 9 million. And even though there might be more Canadians playing currently in the MLB than, say, Japanese, everyone understands that players from Japan - and Venezuela, the D.R., Cuba, and elsewhere - take a very different route to the pros - they don't come from the draft, and they usually come almost MLB ready. The American (and Canadian) kids in the draft, with few exceptions, still have a lot of steps to climb.
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