Ivies face challenges in getting players drafted

Recent Major League Baseball draft pick from Dartmouth Robert Young compared draft day to a wedding proposal.

“I’ve been working this entire time, and this is like the pay day,” he explained, “when I’m gonna find out if what i did was worthy enough.

“Sure enough, they proposed, and I accepted.”

Two other Ivy League players, Dan Barnes of Princeton and Trygg Larsson-Danforth of Yale, also heard their names called during the June 7-9 draft. All three were selected during rounds 31-50 on the event’s final day last Wednesday.

While Penn produced no draft picks for the fifth straight year, junior Will Davis and his teammates have three more names to add to their list of MLB draft picks they’ve played against.

“It’s pretty fun to say you’ve played against someone who’s in the major leagues,” Davis said.

For Barnes, a 35th-round pick by the Toronto Blue Jays, Larsson-Danforth, a 49th-rounder by the Boston Red Sox and Young, a 31st-rounder by the Chicago White Sox, the first step to the major leagues took place last week.

But while three Ivy Leaguers now have the chance to live out their athletic dreams (Barnes, the lone junior of the group, and Young have both signed with their respective teams), the fact that only three players were picked from a conference full of talent revealed the challenges of jumping from the Ivies to the pros.

“Scouts know that we have that degree to fall back on,” Young explained. “It’s tough to invest a ton of money into an Ivy League graduate because they don’t know how long he’s willing to stick along in the minors before he goes and pursues a high-paying career.”

As Princeton coach and 9-year MLB veteran Scott Bradley also noted, teams are hesitant to draft underclassmen Ivy players like Barnes because they know they have to pay a hefty sum in order to convince the player to forgo his final year.

Those two major issues leave players like Penn’s Tom Grandieri, the 2010 Ivy League Player of the Year, in search of another career path.

“I was a little surprised Tom Grandieri didn’t get drafted,” Davis said. “I thought that being a local guy, he might have a shot at going to the Phillies” — a team that Grandieri worked out for, according to Davis.

Penn senior infielder William Gordon also worked out for MLB teams, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers, Davis said.

It’s not always easy to spot a major league talent while he’s playing in the Ancient Eight, either.

While Davis said Barnes stood out because of the pack of scouts who came to watch his starts, and Larsson-Danforth because of his size (6-foot-6, 240 pounds), “I didn’t think anyone really stood out too much” as a pro prospect this year, he added.

In fact, neither Barnes nor Young made an All-Ivy team during their career, and both had career earned run averages over five.

When it comes to pitchers, a fastball with high velocity is what makes scouts flock to see a college player throw.

“[Scouts] look for projectibility. They don’t really look at numbers,” Bradley said. “All of the coaches in the league, we’ve had some great pitchers for us that throw 84-86 [mph] and don’t even get the slightest sniff from professional baseball.”

As far as position players go, Barnes said the MLB prospects are easier to spot.

“You can tell when kids have tools. They have a part of their game that really stands out,” he explained.

But regardless of college performance, getting drafted ultimately comes down to what Young called “the final examination as far as talent level goes.”

“Were you talented enough to take it to the next level?”

Only three were deemed talented enough this year, and considering the challenges Ivy players face, that number isn’t likely to see a dramatic increase any time soon.

Which means, to continue Young’s analogy, a lot of Ivy Leaguers’ proposals are being rejected.

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