Does the NCAA Baseball junior year draft rule still make sense?

NCAA regulations stipulate that baseball players become eligible for the MLB Draft in their junior year. Does this rule still make sense?

Every year thousands of college baseball players sit in heavy anticipation of having their names called for the MLB Draft. They’ve spent three years waiting for this moment, unless, of course, they were drafted out of high school but chose to go the college route first.

While Major League Baseball has to wait until the players’ junior year of college, NCAA basketball players are eligible to declare for the draft after their first year of college. Does it make sense that baseball players have to wait so much longer?

I spent over a decade working as an assistant athletic director for academics at a D-I university. I worked closely with the baseball team and saw many guys get picked up in the draft, including a guy who was taken fourth overall. Day 1 of the draft is always exciting, but then the phone calls start coming in on Day 2.

As the academic counselor for the athletic department, I was the one who received the calls from agents asking how many classes the guys had remaining in order to graduate. Once the number of classes was determined, an amount of money was identified to cover the costs for guys to eventually return to school to finish their degrees. This money was to be included in MLB contracts.

More often than not, guys that were really good ball players entered college knowing that they would likely go in the draft, and so they took a minimum number of classes to stay eligible rather than taking what was needed to graduate on time. Graduation was not the primary focus, rather it was getting through school until junior year. (This was often reflected in parents’ attitudes as well; school was not the main focus even though these guys were getting $55k per year to attend). It also meant that guys would reach their junior year with one and a half to two years of coursework remaining to graduate, rather than a single year, which was much more expensive.

One thing I saw time and time again was that agents often balked at the costs associated with finishing school at our private institution, where tuition was $55,000 annually opposed to less than $10,000 at a University of California school. Asking a team to add over a hundred thousand dollars to a contract was not easy, and it didn’t always happen. A lot of guys came back from the minor leagues in their mid-20s looking to finish school, and they had to find ways to pay for the rest of their education. Does it make sense to force college baseball players to stick around for three years if they could leave sooner?

Let’s be clear: This isn’t the case with every player. Not all guys bide their time in college waiting for the draft; many college baseball players make the most of their educational experiences. College baseball is a great place for guys to hone their skills. On the flip side, guys with a lot of talent out of high school, like Hunter Greene, take a big risk spending three years playing college ball. In some cases, it is best to bypass college in favor of the big league, but those cases are few and far between.

Next: All-Time 25-Man MLB Roster

The point, however, is that NCAA baseball players must wait three years to be draft eligible, while NCAA basketball players are eligible after their first year. This rule should be examined closely, because it really puts baseball players at a disadvantage given that they have to wait three years while basketball players can leave at any point following their first year of college. Will a change in this rule make college baseball messy? Yes.

This will have a big impact on college rosters. However, at this point it’s only fair that baseball players have the option to declare for the draft earlier if that’s how it works for other college sports.