baseball draft question

[nyy15]

I'm curious on what are the MLB draft rules for players in the Independent Pro Baseball League.

Questions:

1. Say a player is drafted by Pittsburgh, but doesn't want to join their system. Can the player go play in the independent league then become a free agent? My guess is Pittsburgh has rights to the player for X years. If so how many years?

2. Say a player doesn't expose themselves to MLB draft, instead plays in the independent league. Can the player become a free agent to play MLB?

[Edited by nyy15 on May 18th, 2000 at 01:14 PM]

[Yankee Fan Sedere in equo]

Look at JD Drew as an example. He didn't want to play for the Phillies (for whatever reasons), so he took his case to an arbitrator to decide whether or not he could be a free agent. While the case was being decided (and after it was) he played in an independent league. The arbitrator ruled that he had to re-enter the draft the following year, taking away the Phillies rights to him.

I can draw from this that A)The case gets taken to an independent, neutral party to decide what happens and that B)You have to expose yourself to some type of draft if you have never played professional baseball in the MLB minor leagues or Major leagues if you are an American born player, since foreign born players are not drafted anways.

[clipper]

I believe that if a team has one year to sign a player that it has drafted. If it fails to sign him (J.D. Drew in Philadelphia), then he goes back into the pool. I believe that the arbitrator was called in to determine whether Drew's participation in the independent league changed that issue.

There are scores of players drafted each year that choose to go to college rather than sign with a big league club. Often, these guys turn up in future drafts.

I might be wrong (yes... it happens) on some of this stuff, but this is how I think it works.