There just might be a Hall of Famer drafted on Monday. Somewhere, lurking among the 1,200 or so hopefuls who get picked, there's going to be an all-time great, someone who defines a position for his franchise for the next several decades. We know there will be All-Stars drafted, several of them, probably a bunch in the first round. We know that some of the players drafted will eventually help their organization -- or some new organization five, 10, or 15 years from now -- win a championship, hoisting a trophy up and spraying champagne all over the place.
We also know that some teams will have regret. Cold, lingering regrets that will keep GMs up at night, long after they've retired. This is an article about those regrets. Specifically, five baseball legends who were drafted and not signed out of high school. In a sport with a deep, rich legacy of what-could-have-beens, here are five of the greatest what-could-have-beens in draft history. These are the alternate histories I would pay to visit, even if just long enough to flip through Baseball-Reference for a few minutes.
Randy Johnson, Braves (4th round, 1982)
Randy Johnson is one of the great player-development stories of his generation, a combination of unmistakable talent and unrepeatable mechanics. It's not like organizations were overflowing with pitching coaches who could say, "Oh, a 6'10" guy with mechanics of death and a 99-mph fastball? Sure, I've worked with a dozen of those, I know just what to do." The first time he walked fewer than five batters per nine innings at any level, and the first time he had an above-average season in the majors, he was already 29.
It's odd to think that a 10-year contract for him after that season would have been too short, considering what a project he was. If he were to go to one team out of high school, though, maybe the Braves could have rewired him just a little bit sooner. The tricky part is in the timing -- the Braves weren't exactly the 1990s Braves yet. They had a four- or five-season contending oasis in a desert of suck back in the early '80s, so they weren't completely adrift, but their player development was. The year before they drafted Johnson, they went through an entire draft without finding one major leaguer. Not even a cup of coffee. That's hard to do.
So there were no guarantees that Johnson would have been sucked up in the Maddux/Glavine/Smoltz tidal wave, especially considering the Bobby Cox regime didn't start for three-and-a-half more years. Still, Johnson's first well-above-average season with the Mariners came in 1993, when the Braves won 104 games, and his general rise corresponds almost perfectly to the start of the Braves' NL East dynasty. Perhaps instead of trading Jason Schmidt for Denny Neagle, they hang onto Schmidt, too. Or maybe instead of daydreaming about Maddux/Glavine/Smoltz/Johnson, daydream about Johnson still being in his prime for the years when Russ Ortiz was the staff ace.
Or maybe the Braves would have made Johnson a closer, and while he could still be in the Hall of Fame as the left-handed answer to Mariano Rivera, we would never have known the kind of brilliant career we missed out on.
Or maybe the Braves would have traded him to the Mets for a 38-year-old Tom Seaver back in 1983. And as long as we're in the mood for fictional super-rotations ...
Roger Clemens, Mets (12th round, 1981)
I just want to read some of the reports submitted by the A's scouts covering Texas back in 1983. The A's drafted Stan Hilton out of Baylor, and he never made the majors. One of the greatest pitchers of all time was about 100 miles south, and it's not like he was an unknown commodity. For whatever reason, though, 18 teams passed on Clemens.
That's nothing compared to two drafts earlier, when Clemens lasted until the 12th round, where he was taken by the Mets. Assuming the same path to the majors -- and it's not like the Red Sox had to tinker much, considering Clemens made just 17 starts in the minors and blew away the competition at every stop -- he would have been in the majors for the Mets in 1984, with Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, and Dwight Gooden. It's not like the Mets could have won two World Series in 1986, but just the possibility of a few Clemens/Gooden seasons for the same team makes this a worthwhile fantasy.
Here's how the Los Angeles Times described the two pitchers in 1986 before the All-Star Game:
It is a pitching matchup that seems to rival any of the previous 56, as captivating, at least, as Gomez vs. Hubbell in '34, or Grove vs. Dean in '36, or Vander Meer vs. Gomez in '38, or Wyatt vs. Feller in '41, or Newhouser vs. Blackwell in '47, or Parnell vs. Spahn in '49, or McLain vs. Koufax in '66, or Palmer vs. Seaver in '70, or Palmer vs. Gibson in '72, or Palmer vs. Blue in '78, or Ryan vs. Carlton in '79.
This is Clemens, Boston's 23-year-old Lord of the Ks, vs. Dwight Gooden, the New York Mets' 21-year-old Dr. K. This is heat that complements the Texas humidity and challenges the humility of the best hitters in baseball.
Instead of that matchup, imagine those two on the same team. It's like a buddy-cop movie, but with more strikeouts.
"Maybe this is just a little preview of October," (Gooden) said, alluding to the possibility that his own Red Sox and Gooden's Mets will meet in the more important World Series, setting up another confrontation between the flame-throwing young pitchers.
Oh, sure. We know how that turned out, though, and all we got was one of the most exciting World Series ever. What if we could have seen really good pitchers on the same team, though?
(Okay, maybe that's not as exciting. Still, Clemens and Gooden as teammates might have made me a Mets fan for life. They hook you when you're young, you know.)
Barry Bonds, Giants (2nd round, 1982)
The Giants offered him $70,000. Bonds wouldn't take a penny less than $75,000. And for $5,000, the Giants missed out on two MVP seasons. The worst part might have been that then-manager Frank Robinson offered to pay the difference out of his own salary.
"I said, 'Give him $5,000 of my money.' I was serious. They said: 'No, he's going to school. He's going to school, and in a year or so, he won't make it.' They let him go. They stopped at $70,000.
This is a little more complicated of an alternate history to unpack, considering that the Giants did get Bonds as a free agent. Also, in Bonds' best seasons, the Giants were a 90-loss team that even an MVP couldn't fix. There's a strong chance that the fates were kind to the Giants on this one, with the benefit of hindsight.
Still, the youth movement of 1986 -- with a team slogan of "Ya gotta like these kids" -- was perfectly timed for a Bonds debut, and he could have helped the 1987 team past the Cardinals in the NLCS, allowed the '88 team to escape the gravity of mediocrity, and he probably would have stopped the earthquake in 1989 with his mind. Or, at least, he could have hit Dave Stewart or Mike Moore in the World Series.
I don't think there are many Giants fans who would trade in their time with Bonds for what's behind Door No. 2. It's possible that a six-year stint with the Giants at Candlestick would have pushed Bonds out of the door before free agency, which means little interest in the team, which means no new ballpark, which means the San Antonio Giants are in their 11th season.
Unless they used Bonds to win the 1989 World Series and get a new ballpark built. What were some of the ballpark designs like back before AT&T Park?
Mm-hmmm. Right, right.
Bonds eventually got his money. The Giants reinvested that $5,000 in a foam crab, and everything worked out, even if it took decades to realize it.
Mark McGwire, Expos (8th round, 1981)
Follow me, here: Mark McGwire saved baseball. The Expos were a part of baseball. The Expos eventually needed to be saved. Ergo, post ex facto hoc emptor, Mark McGwire would have saved the Expos. You can't argue with that kind of logical proof.
Okay, so it wouldn't be that easy. First, McGwire was drafted as a pitcher, and there's a chance that he would have had a Ken Brett-like career on the mound, always hinting that his real talents were as a hitter. Second, it's hard to figure out what the 1987 Expos would have done with both McGwire and Andres Galarraga. A trade, probably, unless they went with the time-honored tradition of stuffing one in the outfield and hoping everything worked out.
Still, I would have liked to see the 1990 Expos -- 85-77, and underperforming their expected record by four wins -- with the extra 39 dingers that McGwire could have offered. An excellent postseason run could have translated to more interest the year after. And the year after that. And when it was time to trade Pedro Martinez, why, they would have had Mark McGwire going for 50 homers, so why not keep them together for a little bit?
And if they're together for a little bit, say, that 1998 season wasn't so bad. It saved baseball after all. At least, that's how the story goes, and when do people embellish that sort of thing? And if he saved baseball ... maybe ... just maybe ...
Nine seasons, 38-45, 4.33 ERA, six saves
Eh, probably. But, c'mon, lemme just peek at this alternate universe.
Bo Jackson, Yankees (2nd round, 1982)
And yet, of all of the above, this is the one I want to see the most. The year before, the Yankees drafted John Elway, who had a brief, successful time as a minor leaguer, so it's possible that the Yankees could have averaged 21, 28, or even 35 runs per game, depending on the quality of their special teams. But the what-if for Jackson is especially bitter, considering that the hip injury that cut his career short came on a football field.
Jackson's mother had a feeling about that:
He soon began playing football. ''My mother was against it, she was afraid I'd get hurt,'' said Jackson. ''And she'd sometimes lock me out of the house when I came home from practice.''
Always listen to your mother, floss twice a day and never tweet. Those are probably the three most important things to remember in this life.
Imagine, then, Bo Jackson focusing entirely on baseball. The Yankees offered him $250,000, which was a vast sum for a draft pick back then. He was drafted as a shortstop, and maybe after a few years of full-time tutelage, he could have stuck there. If your first instinct is to scoff, make a list of the things Jackson couldn't do as an athlete. Start him as a shortstop when he's a teenager, and I'll bet he gets awfully close to making it work, even as he fills out.
Or if he moves to the outfield, fine, but imagine him with 1,000 or 2,000 minor league at-bats instead of the 184 he got before he was rushed to the majors. Picture Jackson staying back on breaking balls and learning the value of commanding the strike zone and waiting for his pitch.
How about Jackson and Rickey Henderson in the same outfield? Or Jackson coming into his own for the 1991 Yankees, helping them win a few more games, and allowing them to draft Michael Tucker in the 1992 draft, instead of that skinny high school kid from Michigan? There are so, so many beautiful dreams that Jackson and the Yankees could have fulfilled. So very many.
The Giants would have drafted Derek Jeter and he would have taught Barry Bonds how to love life, for example. It would have been a cross between Bull Durham and As Good As It Gets. And we would have got to enjoy Jackson as a baseball player for decades. Heck, he would have just retired five years ago, traveling down the Julio Franco path in his later years. If only ...
The fractals and butterflies and weird alternate dimensions of the draft are always fun to think about. With those five, though, I can't stop thinking about them every June. What if, people? What if?
(Note: I ignored Tom Seaver and the Dodgers on purpose.)