MLB will hold its annual draft of players virtually no one has ever heard of on Monday night. And most of the roughly thousand or so players whose names will be called will never make the big leagues. So while the MLB draft is not exactly an exercise in futility, it is a crapshoot.
How much crap is being shot? Well, let’s take a look at drafted players who have made it all the way to the Hall of Fame. Since the draft started in 1965, just 39 players who were selected are in the Hall. That’s out of the more than 50,000 players taken, if you estimate a thousand per year.