Passion Project: Baseball America's Ultimate Draft Book is here
Baseball America founder Allan Simpson, shown here when he was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in St. Marys has a must-buy book out: Baseball America's Ultimate Draft Book.
The baseball draft celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2015, and what better way to look back on more than five decades of draft history than with Baseball America? Founding editor Allan Simpson has collected the best information from our rich archives and assembled it in the ultimate draft compendium. You’ll get complete draft lists from every year, with signing information, biggest successes and busts, the most signing bonus information ever published, and all the stories that make draft history so rich. The book also includes all the results from the 2016 draft.
By Allan Simpson
Baseball America
While most of us who are old enough remember where we were when Bill Mazeroski hit his magical home run in 1960, or when we learned of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, or saw man’s first landing on the moon in 1969, I could tell you where I was on June 8, 1965, when Rick Monday became the first player selected in the inaugural Major League Baseball draft.
I was a high school student in Kelowna, BC, on my lunch hour, when I heard the announcement on my local radio station.
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Ultimate Draft Book, Part I
The moment was inconsequential, but it resonated with me over the years and explains why the draft became an integral part of Baseball America’s coverage when the publication was launched 16 years later in the garage of my home in Canada.
Others developed a fascination for the NFL and NBA drafts—even the NHL draft, for those of us who were born and raised north of the border. My passion was always the baseball draft.
It was the last of the drafts to be instituted, and while it was conducted in relative anonymity through the years—partly because of the obscurity of the players involved, partly because MLB preferred to keep it that way—the baseball draft has become a meaningful event on the baseball calendar every year in early June.
Though it still gets nowhere near the media coverage the other drafts receive, the baseball draft has surged in popularity in recent years and remains the singular event that Baseball America most identifies with.
After 50 years, it’s even fair to say that the baseball draft has come of age, and it’s an appropriate time to chronicle a half century of draft history.
Beginning with Monday, who was selected by the Kansas City Athletics with the first pick in the first draft, some 70,000 players have been drafted through the years, and every single name can be found in the pages that follow. The list runs the gamut from Hall of Famers—34, to be exact—to countless late-round picks who never played the game professionally.
Of course, the most insightful way to look at the baseball draft is in hindsight. We did that in 1989 when we published a thorough recap of the first 25 years, and we’ve outdone ourselves with this volume. Not only have we included many of the same storylines and anecdotes, but we now have access to thousands of signing bonuses that allow us to tell the story through an entirely different prism.