The 2020 MLB Draft happened in five rounds. Five. In a process that at the time spanned 40 rounds and usually touched the lives of more than 1,200 amateur players, baseball conducted its annual talent pipeline operation in 160 picks and called it good. Done.
That's not a draft. That was cheap speed dating.
As a society, we've spent enough time chronicling the COVID era in terms of what it meant for stadiums, for service time, for the 60-game sprint that passed for a 2020 season. But the draft, the actual machinery of how this sport replenishes itself, got gutted in a way that we're only now fully equipped to measure. Because the kids who fell through that five-round trapdoor? They're either in their primes right now, or they aren't playing at all.
There were few winners from the 2020 draft. The White Sox changed their organization in a meaningful way for a short time by landing Garrett Crochet with the No. 11 pick. The Braves landed a future Cy Young finalist in Spencer Strider in the fourth round. Jordan Westburg went to the Orioles. And finally, after years of tumultuous minor league play, Pete Crow-Armstrong debuted with the Cubs. He was the Mets' first rounder that year. Beyond those names and a handful of others, it was something of a wasteland in a lot of ways. Few players got scouted. Teams were throwing darts.
The real shortcomings by MLB owners didn't revolve around rules for scouting in a pandemic or the subsequent players that were drafted, but rather the players that weren't.
When MLB compressed the 2020 draft to five rounds, they offered teams a consolation prize: unlimited undrafted free agent signings, but for a maximum of $20,000 per player. No exceptions.
Let that sink in. A player who would've gone in the eighth round of a normal draft, maybe a polished college arm with a real shot at the big leagues, could now be had for twenty grand. That's about ten percent of what they'd have traditionally made in the eighth round. Instead, they were told they're worth the price of a used Honda Accord. The message sent to those players was that their years of development, their (lost) spring seasons, their training... all of it had a market value MLB was comfortable capping at twenty thousand dollars.
Most of the legitimate prospects said no.
The players who had real leverage, the draft-eligible juniors with legitimate top-10-round profiles, went back to college. Which is the right call. Because a college season means another shot at a real bonus. And an education if you're into that sort of thing. And that's exactly what many of them got.
Andrew Abbott is one of the 2020 draft's defining stories.
Abbott came into that fall as a consensus top-150 talent, a Virginia lefthander who'd been working out of the bullpen but had the arsenal to start. When the five-round curtain fell and Abbott's name wasn't called, he had a choice to make.
He went back to Charlottesville. Moved into the Friday night role. And in 2021, pitching as the clear ace of one of college baseball's elite programs, Abbott went 9-6 with a 2.87 ERA and led the country with 162 strikeouts in 106.2 innings. The Reds took him in the second round and paid him accordingly. He debuted in June 2023, threw six shutout innings against Milwaukee in his first career start, and hasn't looked back. He was a National League All-Star in 2025.
That's the best-case scenario. A player with the talent to fight through an extra year, the organizational support to do it, and the physical health to come out the other side. Abbott got all three. A lot of guys in his position didn't.
There's a number that doesn't get talked about enough. In a normal year under the previous CBA, roughly 1,200 players got drafted. In 2020, 160 did. That's more than 1,000 players across every round from 6 to 40 who had to figure out their baseball futures without the structure of a signing.
Some went to independent leagues. Some went to graduate school. Some quietly stopped playing altogether. The players who fall in rounds 6 through 40 of a normal draft back then weren't household names, but they are legitimate professional prospects who deserved the chance to compete for a 40-man roster spot and a climb up the ladder. The five-round format denied them even that.
And then there's the ripple on the other end. The 2021 draft class absorbed a wave of re-entrants from the 2020 eligible pool. The talent was there. It just got rerouted. Abbott went in the second round when that spot could have been occupied by a first-year eligible player. And that trickled down to later rounds. Other players dropped a round or several due to age concerns and lost leverage. The whole ecosystem shifted, and it shifted at the expense of the players who didn't have the college eligibility clock to fall back on.
The five picks that ended up mattering most from the 2020 draft proper? In a redraft by production, you'd have Crochet and Strider at the top of the conversation. Crochet was a consensus choice, an absolute weapon out of Tennessee who went 11th overall and made the big leagues the same calendar year he was drafted. Strider's story is well-documented.
But Heston Kjerstad went second overall. Max Meyer went third and has fought injuries his entire pro career. Spencer Torkelson, the first overall pick, has spent three years in the majors fledgling in various directions. The top of the class, and the first round as a whole, was something of a disaster in 2020. And it didn't have the later round gems to pick up its misgivings.
It's hard to say whether there's a single beneficiary to the 2020 chaos. Sure, there are a few teams that drafted better than others, but as a whole, the entire draft, its lead-up and its results are disappointing at best. College baseball programs got access to more talent than usual, but the roster crunch and program limits diminished what tangible gains the beefier freshmen classes provided.
The real losers are harder to name, because they're not on rosters. They're the players from the 2020 draft class who needed rounds six through forty to exist and didn't get them. Players who might be big leaguers right now, or at least have been given a fighting chance to find out.
The 2020 draft was a five-round skeleton of what this process is supposed to be. The ghost class it created is still out there, scattered across independent leagues and college dugouts and careers that ended too soon. We're only now seeing the full shape of what got taken.