![]() Rookie sensation Christopher Morel is getting a lot of support from Latin players he grew up admiring, including Albert Pujols and Jose Reyes. ![]() A lot of young men will wish they had a similar opportunity in the coming weeks. When it comes down to it, García is more fortunate than most. Careers will end and dreams will die for a lot of those young men, most of whom you’ve probably never heard of. Right now, hundreds of professional baseball players are more than a little concerned about their futures with the minor league draft about five weeks away. Those young men are the future of the Cubs and there are similar stories among baseball’s other 29 clubs. It’s fun to get excited about players like Brennen Davis, Brailyn Márquez, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Owen Caissie, Caleb Kilian, Jordan Wicks, Cristian Hernández, and James Triantos. That means 20 players from each organization may see their dreams of becoming big-league players die before next season starts. Each team has four affiliates and the draft means each team will add 20 or so new prospects to their systems. If you use the 40-man roster as your guide, there are approximately 1,200 players at the major league level or who are being counted on to eventually make it there. The culmination of his current journey includes two years where García played in Italy. At 29 and with a career resume that includes just 198 plate appearances for the Cubs and Astros, the utility player left the States for $180,000 from the LG Twins. As luck would have it, some major league success afforded García the opportunity Chicago was probably never going to provide. Imagine a journeyman like Robel García, who recently left the Cubs organization for a higher-paying opportunity in Korea. It’s almost a miracle that most MLB teams are now payingfor some type of communal housing. The fact is, most professional baseball players start out as seasonal workers on minor league teams, making little more than $1,200-1,500 per month with a small daily stipend, which, added together, comes out to less than minimum wage. Of all the players that do get drafted, about 10% ascend to The Show. Just guessing, again, but I’d bet that about 8% of high school and college players are eventually drafted by a U.S. If I had to take an educated guess, I’d say that about 6% of high school players will continue the sport at the collegiate level. I don’t have the exact statistics, but having played in several dynasty leagues for the better part of two decades, I know attrition is pretty consistent. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the minor leagues, where the sport serves as a little more than low-paid training and a labor of love for many of its athletes. Yes, that includes the likes of Daniel Descalso, Derek Holland, and Zach Davies, all of whom had success before joining the Cubs. Major League Baseball is ultimately an entertainment showcase played predominantly by stars and when you think about the journey from high school to the bigs, it truly is the elite that completes that trek.
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