The Daily Jolt is a dose of baseball reality every weekday morning.When it comes to the amateur draft, baseball isn't like football or basketball. There's almost unfathomable depth to the process and with that depth comes tons of uncertainty. It's not as much of a crapshoot as the casual observer thinks it is, but there's still plenty of noise.
When Ryan Leaf winds up coaching for West Texas A&M, we snicker. When Len Bias overdoses on cocaine and dies, we bow our heads and say what a shame. Tragic, spectacular or both, we know when highly touted NFL and NBA draft prospects flame out. It's not the same when Russ Adams or Matt Bush or Bill Pulsipher wind up out of a job.
Adams, Bush and Pulsipher all made waves Thursday, but unlike their meteoric rises in the baseball world, the trio barely register a blip on the radar in 2009.
Adams, the 14th overall pick in the 2002 draft, was designated for assignment by the team that drafted him, the Blue Jays. The reason? Toronto had to clear a roster spot for waiver claim T.J. Beam. Beam is a 28-year-old relief pitcher who has logged 63 2/3 innings in his major league career. Not exactly the most glorious way for Adams' time with the Jays to end.
Bush, as we already covered this morning, was the No. 1 overall pick by the Padres in the 2004 draft. He played shortstop until 2007, hitting .219 over 722 career at-bats, before converting to pitching. He's had questionable makeup since the day San Diego selected him, showing a complete inability to stay out of the back of a police cruiser. One of the worst teams in the majors is kicking him to the curb to sign Cliff Floyd, a defensively limited, injury-prone veteran who has missed 45 games or more in five of the last six seasons.
That's almost $5 million in unrealized potential cast out into the no man's land of baseball.
Pulsipher, unlike Bush and Adams, has long since flamed out. But he too surfaced Thursday, tossing 6 1/3 innings of one-run ball for Puerto Rican club Ponce in the Caribbean World Series. Pulsipher was, of course, one of three members of Generation K, along with Jason Isringhausen and Paul Wilson. They were supposed to pitch the Mets back to the top of the standings in the mid-1990s, but never reached their potential because of injury.
Isringhausen and Wilson both found varying degrees of success in the majors eventually, but Pulsipher never made much of an impact. In that sense, maybe it is a little bit sad to flip on the MLB Network and find a 35-year-old Pulsipher grinding away for a Puerto Rican Winter League team, to see him so far away from the big leagues.
But Pulsipher's story is actually pretty cool. He's spoken publicly about his battles with anxiety and depression trying to raise awareness, telling Baseball America in 2005 "some have thought of my career as a waste ... but I think my career, right now, could be more important than ever."
He returned to the majors that year with the Cardinals after four years of stops and starts, and even though he barely pitched once he got there, he's kept playing baseball -- independent leagues, abroad, wherever. Even after getting knocked down again and again, he hasn't left the game.
There's an odd comfort in that.
Shoeless Joe Jackson kept playing long after he was banished by Major League Baseball. So has Pulsipher. Both might have deserved better, but that's life. That's baseball. While there's still some sliver of hope for Adams, Bush and even Pulsipher that the big leagues will come calling again, it's an awfully small sliver.
Either way, the game presses on, even for those players adrift in the ether.
