By Kiley McDaniel

On today, the high holiday of NFL Draft day, even the majority of baseball people I know are focused more on football than baseball. Some of that is a function of the NFL Draft becoming an enormous sporting event on the level of the Super Bowl for die-hard sports fans.

The rest is because of the natural relationship that baseball has with football. Fantasy Football season coincides nicely with the end of baseball season and players and staff typically use it to wane themselves off of months of 100% baseball, all the time. Because of this, pigskin has become the sport of choice for distracting baseball people from thinking about baseball all day.

Rather than waxing eloquent about this relationship, I’ll use the rest of the post to compare and contrast a few things I’ve noticed about the drafts and similar things you can expect to see in today’s NFL event and June’s MLB draft, all after the jump…

(Pictured right, Arkansas RB Darren McFadden)

The first thing I noticed in the ESPN onslaught on coverage leading up the NFL Draft is that common refrain that running backs tends to drop. And it isn’t just some abstract thought that makes sense in one person’s head, like how Dusty Baker thinks Adam Dunn walking so much is bad because he clogs the bases.

Running backs tend to drop because they are the most athletic players on the field. And there are so many good, athletic running backs that are the best players on their college teams, but there are only so many spots for regular carries in an NFL backfield. So they drop.

Said another way, a pretty good RB at a mid-range school that becomes a 7th round draft pick, say current Giant (and former Marshall RB) Ahmad Bradshaw, is still so athletic, that little things that make him a 7th round pick (that scouts missed on, apparently) make a 7th round pick as a RB more likely to contribute to an NFL team than a 7th rounder from another position.

Many draft experts sum this up by saying “don’t take a running back in the first round, you can find them later,” when this is really true about any position. What they mean is that it’s easier to find productive NFL running backs later in the draft because it’s the most athletic position on the field, thus making a late-round pick of that position very qualified to be a producive NFL player.

And why do they drop if there’s so many good ones? Because there’s so many good ones and only so many spots, simple supply and demand.

Now, another similar thing Frankie and I will say, and what I think you’ll see in some form on MLB draft day is that first basemen will fall, except in this case for a very different reason. Mainly, because first baseman are the least athletic players. They can only play at one position, so their bat and power must be great, and teams just aren’t going to bet on guys withe no positional flexibility, all things being equal, when they can bet on a guy that does have it.

So why do they drop if they can hit so well? Because that’s all they can do.

Really, it’s the exact opposite and interesting to think about, for me at least.

The other big difference, despite recent rhetoric from Bud Selig’s office indicating otherwise, is that the bonuses in football are leaps and bounds more ridiculous than MLB draft bonuses.

As said in an earlier post about Boras client’s asking prices, I mentioned that while MLB and the clubs want to keep bonuses down to be able to spread bonuses to more players and stop draft bonus inflation, they all still admit that if a player plays one season in the big leagues, he more than pays for himself. And the only exceptions are players with enormous bonuses that almost always play at least a few seasons, if nothing else because they got such a big bonus.

The #1 pick in the NFL Draft (Dolphins’ OT Jake Long) will instantly become the highest paid player in the league at his position and one of the highest paid at any position. If he makes a few Pro Bowls in his first 5 years, he still may not be worth all that money. And the top 5-10 picks still make tens of millions in guaranteed money that grizzled veterans will never see, and unless you’re getting a big standout All-Pro player for those 5-6 years of control, you’re coming out behind. And the price only goes up each year.

I realize that baseball draftees are much farther than producing at the highest level than football draftees, but any baseball draftee making the league minimum or more as a signing bonus ($350,000 or so), is expected by his team to reach the majors. If the club is right, they get profit from that transaction for the first 6 years, sometimes in the tens of millions of dollars.

And with a player like David Price getting between $5-10 million dollars at the top of the draft, that cost is still outweighed by one season as a contributor, using simple, freely-available economic stats like Baseball Prospectus’ MORP. That’s one thing about baseball that will never really change since big league salaries will always grow faster than draft salaries, or at least not fast enough to ever change this equation in any material way.