The MLB Draft is supposed to be a big night for baseball. New talent enters the pipeline, teams make franchise-shaping decisions, and the league gets to introduce its next wave of stars. Yet for far too many people, the event barely registers. Some fans do not know when it happens. Others do not know it exists. That is not a small marketing problem. It is the problem, and it starts with a simple question: how does Major League Baseball fix a draft that most casual sports fans are not watching in the first place?
Update, October 2026: The 2026 draft was the first one with NBC in the picture. Per Awful Announcing, NBC carried the first 90 minutes (picks 1 through 10) on a Saturday, MLB Network took over for picks 11 through 40, and the remaining rounds streamed on MLB.com on Sunday. From 2020 to 2025 the first round had aired on both MLB Network and ESPN, and the draft moved from Sunday primetime to a Saturday afternoon slot built around NBC. The same report noted that the draft ran up against regular-season games and criticized the constant shuffling of where it lives. It also pointed out that Commissioner Rob Manfred stumbled over the name of the No. 1 pick, Roch Cholowsky. Nothing says “must-see television” like the boss needing a pronunciation guide.
Prefer to watch? Here is our video take on why the MLB Draft keeps whiffing.
Table of Contents
- The MLB Draft Has an Awareness Problem
- Baseball Faces a Built-In Disadvantage
- Other Leagues Give Prospects a Platform
- How MLB Can Make the Draft Matter
- MLB Must Stop Repeating What Does Not Work
- Our View: Demand a Real MLB Draft Strategy
The MLB Draft Has an Awareness Problem
Baseball cannot fix the draft by pretending it already has the pull of the NFL Draft or the NBA Draft. Putting up a stage, rolling out cameras and reading names does not automatically create an event. People need to know three things: when it is happening, who the important prospects are, and why the picks will matter to the team they love. MLB has struggled to communicate all three.
You cannot quietly schedule a draft, give it a low-energy show, then act surprised when the public does not show up. If nobody knows an event is happening, it might as well not be happening.
Average TV audience, 2024 drafts
Baseball Faces a Built-In Disadvantage
The biggest obstacle is not just weak commercials. Baseball has a structural problem that football and basketball do not have to the same degree. In the NFL, a top pick can be on the field in Week 1. The NBA works much the same way: a lottery pick gets minutes right away and joins the conversation. Fans can watch success or failure unfold in real time.
Baseball is different. A drafted player may go to college, a minor league affiliate or a complex league, and then disappears for years. A first-round pick rarely becomes a familiar name right after draft night. He vanishes into the farm system and comes back to the mainstream conversation years later, if he comes back at all.
The Minor League Black Box
That path creates a black box between the draft and the big leagues. A player is picked, signs, and starts developing somewhere outside the public eye. Unless he becomes an undeniable star or a very public disappointment, the average fan may never hear about him again. The solid, the inconsistent and the slowly improving stay invisible.
Baseball cannot erase player development, and it should not try. But MLB has to admit that the gap between draft night and the majors makes the event harder to sell. That matters most for a league trying to stay relevant with younger fans.
Other Leagues Give Prospects a Platform
Every sport has its own development structure, but presentation matters. Football and basketball prospects get chances to show their skills on big stages, and their names join the team conversation almost immediately. Even hockey lets prospects show personality, style and swagger. Baseball prospects deserve that same attention, even if their road to the majors is longer. Right now the system treats them like names on a list instead of characters in a story.
How MLB Can Make the Draft Matter
1. Put a major network behind it and promote it relentlessly. NBC’s arrival is a start. A broadcast window only counts if people know about it, so promotion needs to start weeks ahead, not the morning of.
2. Build stories, not just rankings. Nobody falls in love with a mock-draft spreadsheet. Give fans the kid with the wild backstory, the two-way oddity, the small-school ace nobody saw coming.
3. Turn draft coverage into a longer event. One night is not enough. Build a run-up of profiles, workouts, hometown reactions and team-by-team stakes, so the draft feels like the finale of something.
4. Follow the players after draft night. This is the one that beats the black box. Regular check-ins, highlights and storylines from the minors keep fans attached to the pick they cheered. Baseball has the content. It just has to show it.
MLB Must Stop Repeating What Does Not Work
Moving the draft around, changing the channel and hoping the audience follows is running in place, not progress. The 2026 shuffle gave the league a new broadcast partner, and critics still said the event was drifting further from mainstream interest. A new logo on the screen does not fix a draft that nobody was told to watch.
Our View: Demand a Real MLB Draft Strategy
Baseball has a great product and a development system that is genuinely compelling when anyone is allowed to see it. What it lacks is a plan for the draft that goes beyond picking a time slot. Give fans a reason to care, a way to follow the players, and a league that can pronounce their names, and the draft stops being an afterthought.
VDG Sports, where Vince Douglas Gregory writes about the business and culture of sports, will keep calling out sports media that treats its own big nights like an afterthought.
Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.