You Know, For Kids: Finding Meaning in the MLB Draft Combine

An empty major league stadium can evoke some unsettling sensations. I’ve been behind the scenes at numerous ballparks before, of course, but usually in the lead-up to or aftermath of a game. I know the low-grade background patter of concessions workers setting up and taking down stalls, the thump of the grounds crew packing the dirt around home plate, the smell of smoked meat on the grill.

During the week of the third annual MLB Draft Combine, Chase Field was a little different. The Cold Stone on the first base-side concourse still smelled delightfully of freshly-baked ice cream cones, even though the stall itself was buttoned up. The whizzing of an MLB Network camera drone was audible throughout the first two days of the combine, as was every crack of the bat and pop of the glove from batting practice, bullpens, and infield drills — even from a suite situated behind the right field foul pole on the stadium’s second level. A vivid palette of ambient noise, because a crowd of dozens, mostly scouts, wasn’t drowning it out.

Of the big four American men’s pro sports leagues, MLB was the last to organize a scouting combine for its draft-eligible prospects. While the NBA and NHL combines have their moments in the sun, the NFL’s is the cream of the crop, an event with almost four decades’ worth of folklore that generates a week’s worth of live TV content for the league’s cable channel, followed by months of buzz afterward. It is said to make and break prospects.

Baseball is a different beast than football; its schedule is unique, its athletes measured and evaluated differently. But 2023 represented a concerted effort by the league to attempt to make the combine into an event.

What ensued over four days in Phoenix last week was an odd middle ground between a showcase in the sense of the idiom used specifically in baseball scouting and a showcase as understood by people who don’t dress exclusively in dri-fit, wielding stopwatches and radar guns. In addition to the drone shots, the league furnished an on-field stage for such MLB Network luminaries as Sean Casey and Harold Reynolds, and an emcee to pump up the crowd (such as it was) between events. MLB.com writers like Jim Callis and Sarah Langs broke down the top performers.

Live batting practice had a few elements reminiscent of the Home Run Derby, most notably the kids shagging fly balls in the outfield. If the Derby has an army of middle schoolers, this was more like a battalion, and their high-effort defense was one of the highlights of the week. These kids had good hands, read the ball well off the bat, and weren’t afraid to fling themselves into full-extension diving catches. It’s possible that a ball that will get a college senior drafted came to rest in the glove of an airborne 12-year-old last week.

Anyone who’s watched a recent Derby knows how much MLB loves a live DJ, and sure enough, out behind the right field seats, hundreds of feet from his audience, there he was. The playlist, heavy on late-aughts pop and hip-hop, seemed tailor-made for a geriatric Millennial like myself, but a bit odd for the players themselves, many of whom were not born when Eminem broke through and were too young to appreciate the earworm genius of Kevin Rudolf and Lil Wayne’s “Let it Rock.”

I asked Max Clark, the 18-year-old who’s currently the top high school prospect on The Board, what he thought of the musical selections: “I’ll give it a six out of 10. Six and a half,” he said.

Clark’s presence at the combine is indicative of the event’s ideal direction. The first combine, held in 2021, took place in Cary and Raleigh, North Carolina, and was mostly for the benefit of scouts, as was the second, held in San Diego. The purpose of a draft or scouting combine is to centralize detailed, nitty-gritty player evaluation that can’t be done behind the backstop at a game. Players undergo detailed medical testing and a battery of strength and flexibility tests, including a timed 30-yard dash. They undergo sit-down interviews with interested ballclubs — on Friday afternoon, I caught Florida high school infielder Aidan Miller (no. 15 on The Board) about halfway through a battery of 19 interviews with teams — and a few take live batting practice, throw a bullpen, and participate in defensive drills.

The utility to evaluators, and the prospects themselves, is obvious. Teams still work players out on their own, sometimes in cattle call-type sessions, sometimes one at a time, but a combine eliminates redundant effort. Get on a plane once, get prodded and bent once, throw a bullpen once, and go home. Scouts can collect measurements, update their priors, and report back. FanGraphs sent Eric Longenhagen to last year’s combine for the event’s intended purpose — to get one last good look at certain prospects a few weeks before the draft. It would’ve been not only useless but preposterous to fly in a feature writer to tag along.

But now the combine isn’t just supposed to be a learning exercise; it’s supposed to be an event. In pursuit of that end, MLB set FanGraphs, and a number of other media outlets, up in suites at Chase Field, and brought in the top attendees for interviews. A press junket, in other words, the likes of which I’d attended frequently when I was writing about television, but rarely if ever in baseball.

The MLB draft is different from other sports, whose top amateur players have been household names for years thanks to March Madness, or the College Football Playoff, or the Memorial Cup. And even accounting for the relative obscurity of amateur baseball, the biggest stars in the draft — Paul Skenes, Dylan Crews, Kyle Teel, and so on — were not in Phoenix but in Omaha for the College World Series, which took place concurrently with the combine.

Putting the top attending players out there, in front of the media, was a wise move on MLB’s part. Before the league started promoting the draft properly, the top prospects — particularly high schoolers — were almost hidden from public view. Prominently featuring them in the lead-up to the draft is the first step in minting the next generation of stars.

No one understood this better than Clark, the Indiana outfielder who — in contrast to many of his more staid and guarded contemporaries — courts attention through an active social media presence. When Clark dropped by to talk to me, he was in the middle of doing the combine’s version of the Full Ginsburg; after about 15 minutes with me, he bounced off down the hall to ESPN’s suite for an on-camera interview with Jessica Mendoza.

Every player who came through was polite and well-prepared, but Clark was on a charm offensive more than any other. I asked him what he was looking forward to at the combine, and he said, “Getting to see Harry Reynolds again. That’s my guy.” I struggled to pin down the vibe Clark was giving off; it felt like he was running for office, but I was also acutely aware of being in the presence of someone who understood TikTok on an intuitive level a person my age could never grasp.

But when I asked Clark who his favorite player was, it all clicked. “Bryce Harper,” he said. His contemporaries — even players like Miller and Arjun Nimmala (no. 29 on The Board), who handled interviews better than a lot of 10-year big league pros — seemed somewhere between cautious of and indifferent to a star-making enterprise. Clark embraced it. For better or worse, he understood that he was in an audition.

“Being a franchise player comes with ups and downs,” Clark said. “Obviously you get the limelight, you get all that good stuff, but when you’re not playing so hot or you’re having a bad day, you get the negative spotlight as well. And you’ve got to be able to handle yourself in those situations. You see it all the time — a guy has a bad game, gets frustrated with the media, and he’s $25,000 down in fines. That can’t happen.”

For the top high school prospects, the interviews, for all intents and purposes, were the combine.

Apart from the College World Series participants, almost all of the top prospects attended in person, but few submitted to testing or took part in drills. Clark says he didn’t even submit to medical testing. Among the players who actually worked out, the most famous was probably Arizona high schooler Duce Robinson, who’s best known not as a baseball player but as a five-star tight end recruit for the University of Southern California. Nobody in the FanGraphs top 30 actually participated in drills or Tuesday night’s high school showcase game.

And it’s easy to understand why. The top 18 draft slots come with a bonus allotment of at least $4 million. A hairy curveball in a bullpen could lead to a poorly timed UCL sprain and blow up a young pitcher’s draft campaign altogether. Even a sloppy BP round could plant seeds of doubt in scouts’ minds and cost a player thousands of dollars. There’s too much to risk for (and I love that we get to use this term in baseball now) a potential lottery pick.

Which leaves the interview.

“Got in around 6 p.m. last night. I’ve got 10 interviews, MRI, bloodwork, EKG, and all that,” said Oregon high school righty Noble Meyer, the no. 12 prospect — and top high school pitcher — on The Board. “I didn’t play [in the high school showcase game]. I wish I did.”

How much can you learn about a person from one 30-minute interview, particularly a person who’s already been picked over at showcases and in home visits? And is it easy for a player to refine an elevator pitch for himself?

“It’s different, because normally we’re not accustomed to talking about ourselves. But I feel like it’s easy to talk about because there’s not much negative to me,” a chuckling Nimmala says.

“Teams know who I am. They’ve already met me and done all their background,” Meyer says. “I can tell them about all my pitches and whatnot, but I’m going with who I am off the field. I’m a player who’s good at supporting other players and creating a family out of a team, because I feel like teams are a family.”

Every player I talked to came back to some combination of the same refrain.

Nimmala: “[I want to] get to know the organization better, to show that not only am I a good player, but a positive personality. A good person, a good teammate, a good leader.”

Clark: “They want to know that their organization is represented by a good player, a good man, good character, all of the above… This comes easily to me. I also have two really, really good parents who taught me to be respectful.”

Boston College first baseman Joe Vetrano: “I think it’s just showing them my personality, the type of kid I am and how much I love the game, how much I love to compete… I’d say I’m a good kid who wants to be good around his teammates and pushes everyone to be better.” (I suggested to Vetrano that he should lead with the fact that he’d just slugged .671 in the ACC.)

Of course, what else should these kids say other than what they know teams want to hear? And while the answer to that one question can be a little boilerplate, it was easy to pick up differences in personality from one player to another.

Meyer was the only prospect I talked to who eschewed the customary combine-issued golf shirt; he came by dressed in a sharp pink dress shirt and khakis, toting a baseball in his humongous right hand. If Meyer hadn’t become a ballplayer, he says he probably would’ve gone to medical school. The son of two engineers, he has always been drawn to science and math, and says he studies the physics and aerodynamics of pitch design “religiously.”

The baseball came in handy when we started talking about the Oregon native’s childhood Mariners fandom. Unsurprisingly for a self-professed fan of Félix Hernández, Meyer can rip off a wicked changeup, the grip for which he was kind enough to demonstrate.

“It’s on a four-seam grip axis,” he says. “I got the idea from Devin Williams and Trevor Richards, because they like to spin their changeups. It’s like a reverse breaking ball. I struggled with not spinning it because I have big hands. So if I just try to turn it over, to pull itself down at 2,300 or 2,400 rpm, it has a heavy dive down.”

A near-universal truth about baseball players is that they don’t like talking about their feelings, but they love talking shop. These high school seniors are no different.

Roch Cholowsky, the Arizona high school shortstop ranked no. 32 on The Board, talked about what he learned from being a high school quarterback, and how he became one of the top defensive infielders in this class. He explained that he puts in lots of prep work to know pitchers’ and hitters’ tendencies, then peeks in before the pitch to see what they’re throwing so he can get the best possible jump on the ball.

“I’m hearing talk about how me and Adrian Santana are probably the two best defenders in the high school class,” Cholowsky says. “And a big point one of the teams made to me was that me and Santana seem to have the same range, [even though] he runs a 6.1 [60-yard dash] and I went 6.6. That’s definitely because of the anticipation and first step I get.”

Cholowsky, the son of a Reds scout, was another player who made the most of his time at Chase Field by maxing out on interviews and appearing on MLB Network.

“One of my favorite things is meeting new people and getting to talk to people,” Cholowsky says. “The camera really doesn’t intimidate me. And I really enjoy having conversations with people I haven’t met.”

But does any of this matter? Can interviews with teams and media move the needle for a prospect who doesn’t pick up a bat or a glove all week?

“I think you absolutely can,” Clark says. “Guys want to see good makeup. They want to see how you’re going to represent the organization. They want to see how you’re handling yourself in media conferences, things like that. Obviously your play on the field is going to have the biggest impact, but this is important too.”

Some players have quite a bit to prove in the interview room. Miller is fighting a two-front battle: As a power-hitting infield prospect, there are questions about what position he’ll play in the pros. Some think he’ll end up at first base, others at third; Miller is still selling himself as a potential shortstop. And he has to do it on talk alone for the moment, thanks to a broken hamate bone that cost him most of his senior season.

“I’m telling teams that I’m healthy now, showing them the medicals, the MRI, things like that, proving that my hand’s fully healed now,” Miller says.

It’s definitely a useful platform for these players, valuable information for teams and the public-side draft evaluators in attendance, and now for reporters who might not otherwise get access to this many top prospects in such a short period of time. (Trust me, there’s a lot more draft combine content coming this week.)

But is it useful as an event? Can it be transformed into a spectator- and fan-friendly enterprise, the way the draft itself went from conference call to carnival in 20 years?

Maybe, but it’s an uphill climb.

The current form of the MLB Draft — as a broadcast and entertainment spectacle — is cribbed from the NFL Draft, so let’s start with that as a point of comparison. Certainly the NFL Combine is the only one that generates the kind of wall-to-wall media attention and broadcast interest MLB would want from its equivalent.

There are several holdups.

The first is that Americans, for reasons that I don’t particularly understand but also cannot deny, are absolute frothing sickos for football. Schedule release day in the NFL is a whole event that people care about. For MLB, it’s a bunch of beat writers tweeting out screenshots of an email and joking about their Marriott rewards points. I’d argue the latter suggests a healthier perspective from a societal standpoint, but it’s not conducive to whipping up a media frenzy over a workout.

I don’t think that’s solvable, but there’s a wide gulf between “total cultural nonentity” and “parity with the NFL,” and I imagine MLB would be happy to get somewhere in that bucket.

The second problem, related to the first, has to do with the profile of players in each sport’s draft. NFL draft prospects have been household names for at least three years; people who follow recruiting have known about them for much longer. Of which MLB draft prospects is that true? Very few, I’d imagine.

College baseball is on the rise, and it’d be foolish to understate what this season has done for Paul Skenes’ Q rating. You don’t have to be a particularly avid college baseball fan to know the ins and outs of Kyle Teel’s game, or Enrique Bradfield Jr.’s, or Wyatt Langford’s. It would be in the mutual interest of MLB, the NCAA, and the players to continue to promote college baseball.

With that said, casual fans don’t know who Max Clark is. Even the kind of people who devour mock drafts only know him through scouting reports and YouTube. There’s probably a subsection of fans who’d pay — and perhaps even travel — to see him take batting practice and run the 30-yard dash, but he didn’t. Nor did any of the other top high school prospects.

And in terms of star power at the combine, MLB caught a bad break by scheduling the event for the same week as one of the most loaded College World Series ever. Of the top nine players on The Board for this draft, seven are college players, and every single one of them — plus the 11th-ranked Teel — went to Omaha this year.

That’s not going to happen every year, but some of the top prospects will always get siphoned off to, you know, actually play meaningful baseball games. That’s not something MLB can solve easily. The other top three sports have college and professional calendars that run in parallel. But MLB runs an April-to-October schedule, while the NCAA runs February-to-June.

Consider, again, the NFL parallel. The end of the college regular season and the Heisman Trophy ceremony are in late November and early December. It’s another month before the end of bowl season, with the Super Bowl about a month after that, the combine a month after that, and the draft itself almost two months after the combine.

MLB has already moved its draft back a few weeks to avoid conflicting with the NCAA tournament. And even now, there are only two weeks or so between the end of the College World Series and the draft. There’s basically no room for a combine between the two, and the draft is already about as late as it can be without imperiling minor league development for first-year pros.

But as big a miss as Skenes and Langford and so on are for the combine, I’d argue the most deleterious effect of the conflict is media attendance. We had three people there over the course of the week. Bleacher Report sent a strong contingent, as did MLB.com. But many of the outlets that devote significant effort to both college baseball and the draft mostly sent their people to Omaha.

As they should, to be honest. Maybe a conflict between the NCAA tournament and the combine is unavoidable. But even if that’s the case, it probably results in a few dozen highly respected and highly motivated journalists skipping the latter event.

But for all the obstacles outside MLB’s control, there are plenty of ways the league can grow interest in the combine.

The first is simple promotion. These steps toward the combine as a public event seemed timid. The imprimatur of Harold (“Harry” to his friends, apparently) Reynolds signals the league’s investment in the enterprise. But running two partial days of TV coverage left a lot of content on the cutting room floor. Certainly it’s a far cry from NFL Network’s weeklong wall-to-wall broadcast of that sport’s combine. What few fans showed up had little to do other than watch drills, which, even as someone who watches baseball for a living, can get a little boring. I concede that it would be embarrassing for MLB to put on a festival and have nobody come, but having not put on a festival, nobody came anyway.

One thing MLB can learn from the NFL is what plays on TV. Trackman data got posted on the center field scoreboard and published on the broadcast, but only on a pitch-by-pitch basis. Though MLB published some highlight figures, we don’t have detailed data on any player’s workout, nor can we perform the kind of cross-sectional analysis open to anyone who watches big league baseball and can find Baseball Savant. More than that, all of the physical testing — flexibility, balance, speed, and so on — took place on Thursday and Friday, and was off-limits to fans. Most of the media who’d made the trip had gone home by then. And why would they stick around when the results of these tests were kept confidential?

The argument for keeping test data private is a shared interest between teams, players, and agents in avoiding the publication of potentially embarrassing test results. No player wants to be the guy with the lowest exit velo or worst 30-yard dash time. But guarding that information isn’t compatible with drawing public interest in the combine as an event. Think about what tidbits from the NFL combine generate mass public interest. It’s all measurables. We want to see Calvin Johnson run a 4.35 40-yard dash in borrowed spikes. We want to see a punter do 30 reps on the 225-pound bench press, or a 350-pound lineman break five seconds in the 40 or put in an absurd vertical leap number. Hell, the size of quarterbacks’ hands is apparently of great public interest.

Even beyond gawking at numbers, I think publicizing these tests would draw a surprising amount of interest from fans who are curious about how these evaluations work. Diehards want to understand what teams are looking for in an athlete, after all.

The teams and agents want to have their cake and eat it in terms of data privacy, which leaves the league in the awkward position of trying to sell fans and media on the idea of watching other people eat cake, while also not telling you what flavor the frosting is.

Hopefully, that would go hand-in-hand with encouraging more of the interview-only participants to take part in drills and tests. As much as I found my conversation with Clark enlightening, the average fan — who doesn’t get that opportunity — probably doesn’t care. They might want to see how far he can hit the ball in batting practice.

Which leads into a final weakness of the combine in its current form, but one that ought to solve itself over time: It’s young.

How much of public interest in the NFL combine is our fixation with football, and how much is cultural inertia for an event that’s gone on in the same place every year since the 1980s? There are traditions, familiar rhythms, that grow out of 30-odd years of repetition.

Not all of those traditions are positive: The hand-wringing over Wonderlic scores, for instance, or the bizarre confrontational questions NFL scouts ask prospects to get a rise out of them. I asked every prospect I talked to if they’d been confronted with any off-putting questions in their interviews and was disappointed to learn that baseball scouts tend to be less weirdly aggro than their counterparts in the NFL. A few players mentioned hearing rumors of weird questions but hadn’t been asked anything untoward personally.

Miller and Vetrano both said they’d been asked whether they store peanut butter in the pantry or the fridge. Both reported that they were pantry people, and rocketed up my personal draft board as a result. (Miller’s full answer: “I said pantry, you know, like a normal person.”)

But the longer the combine goes on, and the more buy-in it gets from players, agents, teams, and media, the sooner these traditions will emerge. We’ll get our own workout warriors, and learn to tell the difference between D.K. Metcalf and Mike Mamula. I wanted to see Bradfield run the 30, but most of all I wanted to see if he could run it faster than Corbin Carroll or Trea Turner, the way every football player with a fast 40-yard time gets compared to Deion Sanders.

These things will only come with time. And as critical as I’ve been of the sometimes-eerie atmosphere at the combine, this is still a young event. Over time, and with sufficient support from the league and buy-in from its participants, there’s no reason it can’t grow into a headline event.

But at this stage in its evolution, the combine itself is much like the players it’s showcasing: Unfinished, even embryonic. It’s hard to know the potential of something so far from maturity, but it’s easy to see both how good it could become, and how far it has to go.