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I’ve sometimes wondered how sports have evolved, in recruitment of professional players.

Baseball has always had minor leagues, and top high school players generally go to the minor leagues, rather than to play college baseball.

Top football and basketball players coming out of high school traditionally have gone to college, and from college get drafted into the NFL or NBA.

Then again, college football and college basketball are big spectator sports, with major TV contracts and generate money and publicity for the colleges. College baseball is not nearly on the same level as football and basketball in those ways.

And to compare in another way, minor league baseball players get paid. They don’t get paid much, but they are paid for playing.

College baseball is not nearly on the same level as football and basketball in those ways.

That’s because the NCAA allows a paltry number of baseball scholarships, and in addition, the mainstream media ignores college baseball, which, to me is much more interesting than MLB.

Perhaps the differences are that basketball and football started at the college level, and then became pro sports, whereas baseball at the pro and college level occurred at the same time.

I've always assumed it was the history of the sports in the U.S. that dictated the different evolutions of the modern professional leagues and their relationships to collegiate athletics.

Basketball and football have no minor leagues because the collegiate versions of these sports were actually more popular than the professional leagues for a long time. It wasn't until the 1950s and 1960s that the NFL and NBA really eclipsed college football and basketball. So the NCAA was built on a collegiate foundation that already existed before the professionals came along.

Baseball and hockey were the other way around. Various professional leagues existed for those sports as far back as the 19th century. In the case of baseball, there were probably dozens of regional professional and semi-pro leagues all over the U.S. before World War II. MLB and the NHL grew out of a natural development where one or two of those leagues in each sport emerged as the "major" leagues, and the others either vanished or continued on as "minor" leagues.

Minor leaguers in lower leagues get little. A college scholarship to a major university is prob. min. of 40k or so a year. Most minor leaguers get less.
Basically, the publics’ obsession for time fillers like sports is what drives the whole enterprise...they just selling the product any way they can