I find baseball's amateur draft endlessly fascinating. Others may gravitate to the glitz and glamour of the football or basketball drafts, but not me. I like baseball's. The baseball draft isn't dumbed down -- it makes you work for its love.

I had been planning on doing some kind of retrospective of past Pirate drafts, but those plans may have been recently made moot. Wilbur Miller over at the Pirates Scouting Report has just put up a comprehensive summary of the Pirate drafts between 2000 and 2004.

The world of prospect evaluation can sometimes lean towards the eternally optimistic, but Mr. Miller offers a refreshingly pragmatic voice. Organizations (and as a result, the press) tend to over-hype prospects, but Mr. Miller's write-up shows he has a good grasp of how the Bucco prospects fit in the overall context of the league. Check it out, it's definitely worth a read.

The throrough draft commentary from the Pirate Scouting Report probably makes any analysis of my own somewhat redundant, but my love of the draft persists. I may just have to forge ahead with my plans for a retrospective of one kind or another -- albeit in some kind of altered form.