Strategies and Practices for the Selection in Baseball Teams

1. Introduction
Winning is the most important thing in my life, after breathing. Breathing first, winning next.

Baseball is the most popular sports in Korea, and its team organization can easily compared with organizations in various industry sectors such as general companies, firms, or government. A baseball team consists of CEO, general manager, manager (head coach), coaches, scouts, instructors and players (employees)…etc. And it is similar to other HR organization structure as well. The main objective of the most companies, in terms of organization perspective, is to make good results or profits for their shareholders and make competitive company overall. Likewise, baseball teams want to get their victories in each game or every time in the season. As George Steinbrenner who was the former owner of New York Yankees always mentioned like above that winning is the most important in the games. This saying tell us lesson that such a baseball team also seeks for their good results like other organizations. So now, I am going to write about some baseball teams’ strategies and practices to achieve good goals which can apply to strategies for other industrial organizations, in particular, compare different selection strategies with success and failure teams in practices.

2. Why is the selection important to Korean baseball teams?
Have you heard about popular audition programs ‘Superstar K’? This program is very hot TV program nowadays, and the reason why it can attract many audiences is that this program stimulates many viewers’ mind to search for new and fresh-talented singers from diverse sources and they have curiosity for selection processes from judge panels with their unique evaluating criteria. Similarly, we are anxious about who is going to be selected and who will be the right person in the teams or organizations, and selection has been important step in the HRM processes. And also it is crucial step for HR managers to select good applicants who are very suitable to the company.
The world most famous baseball league, the major league (MLB) has applicants for their 30 teams in world-wide nations and here is the place where many baseball players have dreamed of. Without any submitting special resumes or participation forms, human resource managers in baseball teams such as scouts or instructors try to search for competent players. They observe whether players have ability to play in the field by analyzing scouting reports written by scouts or some video clips. Then, how about case of Korean baseball? In Korean professional baseball, there are 8 teams and they are sponsored by major companies in Korea to operate their baseball business. And from mid-2000, Korean baseball league has developed the most popular sports in Korea and this league expands their games to business with successful operations and marketing. But it has a smaller-sized market than that of MLB, because Korean baseball league has limited human resource pool in high school or college to pick talented players. Unlike all of world-wide applicants want to go to MLB, only not many high school or college students in Korea and some foreign players are potential applicants. So with these restrictions, Korean teams decide to have their own distinct selection strategies to pick competent players.

3. Main Sources for baseball team players
1) Selections in all-round draft decision
Every September, all baseball teams are getting busy because of special event called all-round draft. Each team can choose ten players in reverse order based on previous year’s ranking. This is the most general way to get players nowadays similar to college recruiting to companies, so all the applicants who graduate high schools or colleges apply for this draft selection. Before started this event, the team managers or scouts discuss about who is the best player at that time. They decide and make strategies