The Minor League Free Agent Draft (or MLFAD) is an annual Effectively Wild competition where the objective is to choose the best roster of minor league free agents.
The MLFAD has proven to be a very competitive event, with hosts sometimes secretly conducting large amounts of research and data collection in the days before the draft. It is also one of the key factors in the elevation of Willians Astudillo to the status of unofficial podcast mascot, as he was a pick in the 2018 edition of the draft.
As suggested by the name, eligible players for this draft are minor league free agents, those who have more than 6 years of minor league service time and are not on a 40-man roster. The pool of players is obtained from Matt Eddy's annual list of minor league free agents on Baseball America. It's mostly players you've never heard of, although there are often surprisingly prominent players you have heard of, and some players who were big-leaguers eight years ago that you had forgotten about.
Each player earns a point for each major league plate appearance (for position players) or batter faced (for pitchers) during the following season. Player performance is not considered. All that matters is playing time, although better performance is certainly correlated with playing time.
Since the draft takes place at the end of the calendar year, several weeks after the list of minor league free agents is generated, many players are eligible for the draft despite no longer being free agents. The sweet spot is to find a strong player on a terrible team.
Starting in 2021, a "control group" of randomly-selected players is added to the mix. The control group does terribly, which at least demonstrates that there is some skill to this exercise.
Summary[]
Year
Sam
Ben
Jeff
Meg
Guest
2014
353
93
2015
560
629
2016
303
898
2017
707
375
2018
1,240
591
203
2019
586
548
1,640
2020
488
94
177
2021
1,311
569
2022
TBD
TBD
TBD
TOTAL
4,327
4,539
1,843
746
AVG*
721
648
922
569
RECORD
4/7
3/8
1/2
0/2
0/0
*The 2020 results are excluded from the average due to shortened season. Point totals for the 2019 draft have not been adjusted for the draft going 11 rounds instead of the traditional 10.
