Cleveland Guardians president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti couldn’t help but jump onto John McDonald — Cleveland’s representative at the 2024 MLB Draft Lottery — and shake him in excitement.
Considering the Guardians had a 2 percent chance of winning the No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 MLB Draft, it’s hard to blame Antonetti for his excitement on Tuesday night as the team locked up the top spot next year.
It marks the first time in franchise history that the Guardians will have the first overall pick in the draft, adding some unexpected drama in the second-ever draft lottery.
“It’s hard to describe. It’s not something that I was expecting at all waking up this morning,” Antonetti told MLB Network after the lottery. “In fact, it wasn’t really even on our radar. Knew it was happening, but given the odds, wasn’t spending a whole lot of time on it. And when we got that inkling that it might happen, it was all I could think about.
“Because this is an extraordinary opportunity for us and an opportunity we really haven’t had in our franchise history,”
What made the circumstances even wilder was that a stipulation in MLB’s collective bargaining agreement helped aid the Guardians in getting the No. 1 pick.
The draft lottery was added to the latest CBA between the league and the player’s association to help reduce the incentive for bad teams to tank their seasons to get better draft positions.
Nevertheless, the CBA also prevents a team that is not a revenue-sharing recipient from landing within the top six in consecutive seasons.
And that is precisely what happened on Tuesday night in Nashville, as the Nationals initially won the first pick, but because of the stipulation, the Guardians’ ping pong ball came up on a second drawing, and they won the coveted draft spot, according to Baseball America.
Oddly enough, the second overall pick went to the Cincinnati Reds, who had a less than one percent chance of winning the No. 1 pick.
The teams with the best odds at the top pick — the Oakland Athletics, Colorado Rockies and Kansas City Royals — missed the mark.
The Rockies ended up with the third overall pick, the A’s got the fourth and the Royals now have the sixth pick in the 2024 MLB Draft.
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