Looking back, after Griffey, Jr., the Pirates drafted a player named Mark Merchant with the #2 pick. The difference of one draft position.
Josh Hamilton came very close to being one of the biggest draft busts in baseball history.
I don’t think you will find anyone in the entire history of baseball who was as big a bust as the NFL’s Ryan Leaf.
DICE K
I think draft picks are a shot in the dark. For all sports. Ryan Leaf was a sure thing, remember? Pete Rose was an awful prospect and went undrafted, then signed a minor league deal with his home town team.
We all know how those playing careers turned out.
the worst pick in the last 10 years has been Matt Bush by the Padres as the 1st pick in 2004. The 2nd pick was Justin Verlander. Doh!
With football, you can make a reasonable approximation of how players will perform at the pro level as opposed to how they did in college. Granted, "sure things" and "can't misses" flop all the time, and guys come out of nowhere to do well.
But drafting high school and even college kids, and trying to project how they will handle big league pitching, or whether pitchers will be able to get big league hitters out, is a total crapshoot.
The thing that makes NFL and MLB projections totally different is the basic difference in the games. There is nothing that compares to the individual confrontation between pitcher and hitter. That is the toughest thing to project.
Mike Piazza was picked in the 62nd round of the 1988 draft by the Dodgers. He had a pretty decent MLB career.