The St. Louis Cardinals technically have a chance at winning the top draft pick...
Yesterday at 11:00 AM
just not a very good chance.
In the Collective Bargaining Agreement reached back in 2022 Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association changed things up on us again. Not content to just confuse me every time there are extra innings or make me look up how many teams make it to the postseason every year, they felt the need to (pun-indented) throw me another curveball.
That curveball is in the form a change to draft, a change that my brain repressed completely until about five minutes ago. This seems to be something the players wanted, which I can support whole-heartedly, but so far in every year this Draft Lottery has existed, I have forgotten about it. So, in case you are in need of a refresher like I did, here is what is different.
In previous years the MLB Draft order was determined very simply: it was by reverse order of the previous season's standings. That means the team with the worst record would get the first pick and so on, with the order for the postseason teams determined by the round in which they were eliminated. So, the World Series winner picks last.
So that is different now. Starting in the 2023 draft, the top six picks of the first round are now determined by a lottery. All teams that did not make the postseason are entered into the lottery. The odds of a team being picked from the lottery are inversely related to the winning percentage, which is to say: the lower the winning percentage, the greater the odds are to be picked for a top six draft spot. Then picks 7-18 are assigned based on winning percentage. The idea for this change seems to be to discourage "tanking" by not guaranteeing the highest pick to the worst teams. But also, it adds an element of suspense and theatrics, because, you see, the teams are not just assigned odds or have more entries, but instead are given a series of 4-number combinations of numbers 1-14. Then, much like the Powerball lottery, four balls are drawn to determine the winning combination.
That leads us to the question the headline likely evokes: what are the odds the Cardinals win the number one pick? While the exact formula the MLB uses is not public, we have been given the final numbers. The odds are inversely weighted by winning percentage, as mentioned above, among the 18 non-playoff teams. Of those 18 teams, the teams that pay revenue sharing cannot be selected for the lottery more than two years in a row, which this year excludes the Oakland A's. Also, teams that give revenue dollars are not eligible, like the Chicago White Sox. With 16 teams remaining, the odds breakdown to look something like this:
The odds are not great, but they are a heck of a lot higher than what they would have been in the previous system, which is admittedly kind of exciting. We will find out just where the Cardinals will pick on December 10 in Dallas at 6:30 pm CT. The lottery will be streamed on MLB Network and MLB.com.
