Once general managers arrived in Las Vegas this week for their annual meetings, Major League Baseball set some odds for its first-ever amateur draft lottery.
MLB announced on Monday that the lottery will take place on December 6 at the Winter Meetings in San Diego. Here’s a quick breakdown of what you need to know:
- The order of the first six picks in the 2023 MLB Draft will be decided at the lottery, which will involve only the 18 teams that did not make the 2022 postseason.
- The remaining 12 teams who do not receive a top-six pick will make their selections in the order of their 2022 winning percentage.
As part of the latest collective bargaining agreement in March, teams are no longer guaranteed a high pick based on their poor play. Instead, the lottery includes all teams that failed to reach the postseason and didn’t forfeit their first-round pick, such as for signing a qualified free agent. The goal of this is to discourage teams from purposefully tanking in order to get the top overall pick, made popular by Houston from 2011-13.
As alluded to already, a team’s odds of winning the lottery are based on the prior year’s win percentage, with the worst given the best odds. If teams have identical win percentages, the tiebreaker goes to the previous year’s record. The remaining 12 postseason teams will fill out the rest of the first round based on when they were eliminated in October and their revenue-sharing status.
As it stands right now, Washington, Oakland, and Pittsburgh all hold the best odds of getting the top pick at 16.5%. The White Sox find themselves on the opposite end of the spectrum at 0.6%, giving them the fourth-worst chances. Here’s how the full list shakes out:
- Nationals: 16.50%
- Athletics: 16.50%
- Pirates: 16.50%
- Reds: 13.25%
- Royals: 10.00%
- Tigers: 7.50%
- Rangers: 5.50%
- Rockies: 3.90%
- Marlins: 2.70%
- Angels: 1.80%
- Diamondbacks: 1.40%
- Cubs: 1.10%
- Twins: 0.90%
- Red Sox: 0.76%
- White Sox: 0.62%
- Giants: 0.48%
- Orioles: 0.36%
- Brewers: 0.23%
Two other professional leagues use a draft lottery, with the NBA starting theirs in 1985 and the NHL in 1995.
MLB Network will be airing the MLB lottery during a half-hour program on Tuesday, December 6 at 8:30 p.m. ET/7:30 p.m. CT.
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Featured Photo: © Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports
