What is the MLB Draft Combine? | Baseball Bar-B-Cast

Yahoo Sports senior MLB analysts Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman preview the 2024 MLB draft combine at Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona. Hear the full conversation on the “Baseball Bar-B-Cast” podcast - and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.

Video Transcript

Here is the deal.

What is the MLB draft combine?

What is a combine the way I have been describing it to people?

I it is essentially a, a tryout or a showcase or a workout.

Uh players who are hoping to be drafted this upcoming draft.

The draft is in about a month during the all star break.

Players go through a series of different drills and workouts and activities and interviews with teams so that the teams can evaluate and assess them and make decisions uh in the draft based upon those performances.

That's how I would throw it in.

You know, the d that would be my combine now in the national football league as you will, you will hear the combine is a much, much bigger deal and part of that is because uh the national football league is a much, much bigger deal.

Baseball instituted.

They created this combine about four years ago.

I am remain skeptical to be completely honest about its importance, but still we are going and we are going to investigate and see just how much it really matters.

But let's get a little bit specific before we do it to Nate Jordan.

What exactly are these players doing these high school and college players?

What are they going to be doing?

What have they done in previous years at Chase Field in Phoenix this week?

Yeah.

So it's, uh, it's four days, sometimes, five days.

It's unclear how long the, the strength and conditioning stuff and the, the interview stuff last into the weekend.

But the first two days in Chase field are going to be just a full blown showcase workout where you're having batting practice sessions, you're having bullpen sessions.

And then on Tuesday night, we'll have a, a high school, a high school all Star game.

And the, the reason why the league wanted to do this is, is a few reasons, but it's not just about necessarily promoting the draft and its process and its players and the amateur players, although that is a big part of it, right, what they still want more of is to be able to get the next generation of players in front of the casual fan way.

And with, by broadcasting this event on MLB network on Tuesday, they are allowing some of the top players to sit at the desk with your favorite MLB network personalities or former players and people can get familiarized with them in a way that even 10 years ago was just not a thing whatsoever, right?

And that fits into uh an overall strategy by MLB to uh promote other aspects, other parts of the sport so that the pipeline from, you know, up the chain, uh fans could care more about players earlier on now they are pushing back against, I would say a couple major barriers, right?

One is that not all the best players are going to be at the combine, right?

And so the players that really you should be caring about like Travis Basada and Charlie Condon who are in the mix for number one overall, you will not see them, they will not be there.

That's one and the other is the gap in time between the draft and when a player reaches the big leagues, right?

Um And so those two things are always going to be working uh against the league.

However, we are interested to see how the combine actually functions as a, as a television event, as an event that people can like invest themselves in.