This article comes courtest of Jim Gleason and Gleason Player Evaluation. Follow Jim and his work here.
There are roughly 526,600 baseball players from NCAA I, II, III, NAIA, JUCO and High School combined each year. With the Draft structure at 20 rounds with supplementary picks added there are around 615 players drafted in each year’s draft.
Simple math…526,600 – 615 = 525,985 players undrafted. Yes, not every player is worthy of being drafted into an organization but clearly there must be some talented players overlooked.
In 2025 there were 549 (UDFA) Undrafted Free Agents signed after the draft. Those UDFA can have greater development upside and contributions to an MLB team than a drafted player in some cases. This isn’t to say that a scout was right or wrong in their evaluation of a player or that a team was right or wrong in drafting or not drafting …