I’m pretty sure that most teenagers don’t understand the concept of “Risk”. I have three teenagers myself and while they appear to me to be pretty well grounded, I’m not naïve enough to think that they understand “Risk” in the real world sense. There is no reason or precedent for them to. They have never lived in the real world.

I usually try to ignore all the signability talk before the draft as it is so full of posturing and second hand information. I have no vested interest in either side of the negotiating.

But the real world is different now that it was just a bit ago. And it doesn’t seem to me as if the kids and the parents and the agents have tuned in to that.

I have been inundated with opinions from scouts and even some agents today with the same thought: “This is crazy, every high school player wants either $2M if he can play pretty well or $500K if he can play even a little bit.”

This is how I see the real world right now: The economy is the worst it’s been in 80 years, unemployment is around 9% nationally and worse in some places and people have lost something like a trillion dollars in investments and savings in the last year.

This is how I see the baseball world: MLB attendance is down 5% and it seems like it’s worse than that if you look at the stands on televised games. MLB will probably never release how far advertising revenue is down but it has to be substantial and is going to get worse before it gets better. MLB salaries are down.

So why do all these kids (and their parents and some agents) seem to think that the Goose that laid the Golden Egg (i.e. the draft for the last decade) just had triplets? It’s completely counter intuitive to think that in this real world/real baseball situation that somehow the baseball draft is going to cruise along unaffected, oblivious to everything going on around it.

Which is where we get back to risk.

There are kids who are risking the chance to get $3M to get a million more. There are kids who are risking $1M to get a few hundred thousand more. There are kids risking $250K to get a $100K more.

There are so many hurdles that they will have to overcome before they get a chance to get offered even the same amount of money again to fulfill their dream.

-- They will have to stay healthy, no small feat especially for pitchers.

-- They will have to maintain their dedication to baseball as they pass through their teen years into adulthood.

-- They will have to survive the temptations that come with that adulthood.

-- They will have to hope they have choosen the right college, as the new NCAA transfer rules won’t let move to another DI school if they sit on the bench as a freshman.

-- They will have to maintain their baseball tools/skills at the same or greater level.

I just don’t see when all the above factors are considered why so many people are willing to risk so much. The reality for many is that when they are 22-23 years old and someone offers them $1,000 and a plane ticket to fulfill their dream they postponed four years previously, they will jump at it.

And they have no one to blame but themselves.