Ban on draft-pick trades can hurt weak teams

Associated Press

Kobe Bryant is chasing his fifth championship with the Los Angeles Lakers — the only NBA team he has played for.

It’s not the one that drafted him, though.

John Elway is as much a part of Denver as the Rocky Mountains; he was originally picked by the Colts.

These little-remembered and short-lived careers — virtually nonexistent, actually — pop up every year around draft time, when a team owns a player’s rights barely long enough for him to put on a ballcap and shake hands with the commissioner.

But not in baseball.

The Washington Nationals have the first pick in today’s draft, and unless they’re scared away by his salary demands, they are expected to take junior college catcher Bryce Harper.

There’s one thing they can’t do: trade the pick.

Unlike their counterparts in other major pro sports, baseball teams cannot trade draft picks or even trade players for a year after they were drafted, like the Charlotte Hornets did shortly after picking Bryant or the Colts did with Elway.

The rule is supposed to keep struggling teams from frittering away their ticket out of the cellar, but concerns that it might be hurting those it’s designed to help have many asking whether it’s time to finally lift the ban.

“I have always been in favor of trading draft picks,” former San Diego Padres general manager Kevin Towers, now a special assignment scout for the New York Yankees, wrote in an e-mail. “I think it would make the baseball draft much more interesting, as well as allowing small- to mid-market teams more flexibility and a chance to be creative.”

With players that are largely considered interchangeable — a slugger doesn’t have to fit into a scheme, like an offensive lineman or power forward — baseball has the most active trade market in sports. It runs from the winter “hot stove league” to the hype and rumors of the midsummer trade deadline that, for teams already out of the running, can be more exciting than the pennant race.

But though football, basketball and hockey teams can package players and picks to land a coveted star, move up in the draft order or even compensate another team for poaching its coach, baseball limits the market to current players and prospects so losing teams can’t sell off their future along with their present.

“Could allowing trading picks help certain teams? Sure, it could,” Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein said last week as he prepared for the 50-round draft, in which about 1,500 players will be distributed over three days.

“There are a lot of positives that could come from it, and then there’s some potential danger that I know traditionally Major League Baseball has been worried about. It could hurt [teams] in the long run, because they’d be tempted to help themselves now, or they wouldn’t want to spend the money on the draft picks so they trade them. It’s a balancing act.”