NEWSLETTER
Some additional fun to look forward to from this year’s Winter Meetings: the very first MLB Draft Lottery.
As previously reported by Joe Doyle and now confirmed by MLB, the Draft Lottery will take place on the Tuesday night of the Winter Meetings on December 6:
If MLB cares about the Cubs at all, they will rig it so the Cubs’ 1.1% chance at the top pick becomes a reality. Just sayin’.
Overall, the Cubs’ chances of landing a lottery pick (one of the top six picks) is about 10%. So there’s your rooting interest come December 6.
From our previous discussion, when the Cubs’ final day win bumped them from the 10th spot to the 12th spot:
In the 12 spot, the Cubs have just a 1.10% chance of landing the top overall pick in the lottery (thanks to Tankathon for the odds chart). Because the first six picks are assigned by lottery, the Cubs also have a small chance at landing one of picks two through six (the total chance at landing in the top six is just about 10%). From there, the Cubs cannot land anywhere else before their own slot at pick 12, where they’ll have a 64.0% chance of picking. Falling to 13 is a 23.7% chance, and falling to 14 is 2.3%. They can fall to 15 or even 16, but those chances are miniscule. So if that happens, you’ll know the baseball gods hate the Cubs.
In other words, it is extremely likely that the Cubs will be picking 12th or 13th in the first round of the 2023 MLB Draft (and if they pop into the top six, that’d be awesome!). In rounds 2 and beyond, they’ll pick 12th, regardless of what happens in the lottery.
How does all that look if they’d instead finished in the 10 spot? Well, the chances at number one aren’t that different (1.80%). The chances of popping into the lottery, though, are a decent bit higher at about 16%. One quirk, though, is that in the 10 spot, you have a much smaller chance of actually sticking in your own slot (just 44.0%). Falling to 11 is 33.0%, and falling to 12 is 6.3%. From there, the 10 can fall as far as 15th, but it’s pretty unlikely to fall past 12.
So, as you can see, it’s definitely worse for the Cubs that they’re in the 12 slot as compared to the 10, but the difference is a little fuzzier than just a straight up two-spot drop (that’s the whole point of the lottery – you want teams not to care all THAT much whether they land in the 3 spot or the 7 spot or whatever, because nothing is guaranteed). That said, the average pick spot for the 10 is 9.5, and the average pick spot for the 12 is 11.5.
