The process of preparing for the MLB Network’s draft broadcast can be an exercise in both frustration and persistence.
This isn’t like getting ready for the NFL or NBA draft broadcasts, where the prospective picks spend their entire college careers competing in nationally televised games. There are no issues with gathering video on the players for those sports, only editing down the plethora of clips on hand. Statistics are readily available, from a variety of sources.
MLB DRAFT 2014: TV coverage | Mock draft
With the MLB draft, though, only a handful of the highest-profile baseball players, playing for the highest-profile college teams, are on national television more than a couple of times. When it comes to finding clips and headshots and statistics of high school players, that’s where the real challenges arise. It’s a massive undertaking.
“We have a team of people who reach out to schools, to players, to parents, coaches, you name it, to try and get video. We’re not picky,” said Marc Weiner, the MLB Network’s coordinating producer of the draft. “… Schools, grandma’s cell phone, whoever has shot it, we’re all good with it.”
The MLB Network will broadcast the first two rounds of the draft, which starts at 7 p.m. ET Thursday night (the pre-draft show starts an hour earlier). The first two rounds include seven compensation picks and 13 competitive-balance picks, which comes out to a total of 74 selections on the first night of the event.
To make sure they have video packages for all 74 players who will be drafted, Weiner’s group obviously has to have information on more than just 74 players. To be safe, they gather information for more than 400 players who could potentially be picked Thursday.
“The last thing you want is for the commissioner to call out a name and you look at each other and say, ‘Uh-oh,’ ” said Weiner, who’s in his third year running the MLB Network’s draft broadcast after 11 years at ESPN working on the NFL Draft. “We’ve got to overprepare by a lot.”
Call it the Hayden Simpson overcompensation.
Simpson, you might remember, was the 16th overall pick in the 2010 draft, by the Chicago Cubs. His selection was shocking; most talent evaluators figured the right-hander from Division II Southern Arkansas would go in the third to fifth round, at best. But the Cubs, who were in extreme penny-pinching mode at the time, chose Simpson because he would cost much, much less to sign than any other first-round pick.
In that moment, the MLB Network had pretty much nothing for the broadcast.
“He came out of nowhere,” Weiner said. “He’s one of the guys on our dartboard of people we weren’t ready for. That’s one of those things where it happens once, and you vow that it won’t happen again.”
Hence the masses of information they’ve amassed for the 2014 draft.
As for the broadcast itself, there will be seven players in Studio 42 for the draft, and the network has in-home live shots lined up with potential No. 1 overall pick Brady Aiken (a prep lefty from San Diego), Evansville lefty Kyle Freeland and San Francisco outfielder Bradley Zimmer.
The Zimmer shot might elicit a sense of déjà vu for some viewers; it will be an almost identical in-home shot to the one the network had in 2012, when Bradley’s older brother Kyle was the fifth overall pick by the Kansas City Royals. The Zimmer family—including Kyle, who’s currently shut down with a lat strain—will be in the same room in their house, all crowded around the same couch.
Last year's set. (MLB Network)
As soon as the last pick is announced on Thursday, which should be sometime around 11:30 p.m., the set teardown will begin, so Studio 42 is ready for regular programming on Friday morning.
And shortly after the folding chairs are put away, preparation for the 2015 draft broadcast will begin. The first stop is in Cary, N.C., for the USA Baseball Tournament of Stars, where they have a photo shoot set up for June 16.
“There really is no down time,” Weiner said.
