How the Guardians landed the top pick in the MLB Draft
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — At 2:30 p.m. CT Tuesday, Ethan Purser entered what he described as an “underground dungeon” at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, with nothing but his room key and a notepad. No phone. No Apple Watch. No contact with the outside world.
“The most terrifying thing I’ve done recently,” Purser said.
At 4:57 p.m., Purser sprinted out of the nondescript room to find his phone, then the meeting point for the organization’s impromptu celebration.
For the two-and-a-half hours in between, Purser — in his fourth day as the Cleveland Guardians’ scouting director — was the only member of the organization who knew the Guardians had improbably landed the No. 1 pick in the MLB Draft. For those two-and-a-half hours, he couldn’t tell a soul.
Instead, he sat in a room with 15-20 other team representatives and league officials, playing Sequence and Yahtzee and Settlers of Catan and Texas Hold’em (using Cheez-It crackers and cookies as poker chips) to pass the time until the draft order was revealed on MLB Network. The Guardians had a 2 percent chance of securing the top pick, the ninth-best odds of any team. Chris Antonetti, Cleveland’s team president, said he had devoted zero brainpower to considering the club might enjoy such a stroke of fortune. Purser and longtime infielder John McDonald, the team’s on-stage representative during the broadcast, simply wanted the team to finish better than ninth.
For the first time in franchise history, Cleveland will select first.
Each team has the choice to send someone to watch the official process, which unfolded inside the Lincoln Ballroom. Purser left his electronics in his hotel room and arrived at 2:30. League officials verified he had no way of communicating with anyone while sequestered. Bill Francis, the league’s director of draft operations, explained the process to those dispatched to the bunker.
They dropped 14 table tennis balls into a hopper, and every 15 seconds, an official pushed a “select” button and one ball would emerge from a tube. They repeated that process four times — taking about a minute in all — to create a four-digit combination that corresponded to a particular team. They printed a list of each possible combination for the team representatives in the room.
Unlike on the broadcast, they started at the top. By about 2:45 p.m., the No. 1 pick had been decided.
And it belonged to the … Washington Nationals.
One issue: The Nationals weren’t eligible because of a league mandate that states a team paying into the revenue sharing pot can’t finish in the lottery in consecutive years. Washington landed the No. 2 pick last year.
So, they started over, and the Guardians were the beneficiary.
“(You’re) seeing some numbers come across,” Purser said, “and you’re looking at your chart, like, ‘Oh, wow. This could happen.’”
But Purser couldn’t relay the news to anyone. There was no clock in the room. There was no window, so Purser couldn’t gauge the time by the dwindling supply of sunlight. He had a secret he wanted to shout from the top balcony of the building, but he had to keep it to himself.
Antonetti headed to the media workroom at 3:45 p.m. for an interview session involving each team’s top executive and its respective press corps. Before he entered the room, a league official stopped the Guardians’ head of PR, Bart Swain. The league wanted to ensure Antonetti didn’t stray too far after he completed his media obligations. Antonetti thought that was odd, and then he remembered the draft lottery was approaching.
As he fielded questions from reporters, Antonetti noticed a few more league representatives chatting with Swain. He stepped back from the scrum, sent a couple texts and received confirmation that the league’s insistence on him sticking around — the draft lottery show took place down the hall from the media workroom — would be worth his time.
“If my answers were a little scattered,” Antonetti later told a few reporters, “more so than usual, (it’s) probably because I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, we just got the No. 1 pick.’”
The MLB Network show started at 4:30 p.m. so the league had time to finalize every production element, from creating graphics and organizing the analysts’ commentary to arranging interviews to supplying country music star and draft lottery host Brad Paisley with the proper envelopes. They also budgeted extra time in case the table tennis ball machine malfunctions.
After the picks were unveiled, Purser rushed out of the ballroom, a few minutes before 5 p.m. He grabbed his phone, which had 50-some texts and a handful of missed calls. He met the rest of the front office for “a moment of collective jubilation.” Antonetti barged onto the stage to bear hug McDonald.
On Wednesday morning, as Purser started to detail his whirlwind day, McDonald walked past. The two hadn’t seen each other since the Guardians’ triumph. McDonald joked that Purser had only just been permitted to escape the secret hideout. Purser said the navy pullover McDonald wore during the broadcast deserves a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The Guardians landed the No. 1 pick. And now everyone knows.
