The First Amateur Draft of 1965: Rick Monday and What Followed
In June 1965 baseball held its first amateur draft. Kansas City took outfielder Rick Monday first, while Johnny Bench went in the second round. This article explains why the draft was created and what the class showed.
In June 1965, major-league baseball held its first amateur draft. Before that month, a high school or college player who wanted to turn professional signed with whichever club made the best offer. After it, a player could sign only with the club that had selected him, and the order in which clubs chose was set by their records the year before. The Kansas City Athletics held the first pick and used it on Rick Monday, an outfielder from Arizona State University.
Monday had a long career, 19 seasons and 241 home runs, and he is remembered for more than his numbers. But the draft he headlined is remembered for something else: how little the order of selection predicted. The second-round pick of that same class, a catcher named Johnny Bench, became a Hall of Famer. A 12th-round pitcher named Nolan Ryan won 324 games. This article explains why baseball adopted the draft, how the first one worked, what became of its best-known names, and what the class teaches a modern reader about the way amateur talent is judged. Career figures come from the historical record through the 2025 season.
Baseball before the draft
For most of the sport's history, amateur players were free agents until they signed. A club's scouts would find a promising teenager, visit his family, and make an offer, and a rival club could do the same. The result was a market, and in a market the richest clubs had the advantage. A club that could afford a larger signing bonus could sign more of the best prospects, and a player's choice of team was limited only by his price.
Baseball's owners disliked that market for two reasons. The first was cost: the signing bonuses that the best amateurs could command were rising, and clubs were bidding against one another. The second was balance: the clubs that could outspend their rivals had an advantage in building a farm system. Earlier attempts to address the problem included rules that forced clubs to keep players who received large bonuses on the major-league roster, so-called bonus-baby rules, which produced their own distortions. By the early 1960s, the owners wanted something simpler.
The solution was borrowed from other sports: a draft. Each club would be assigned the exclusive right to negotiate with a player it selected. The order would favor the weaker clubs, so the teams that most needed talent would choose first. Whether the draft actually reduced bonuses, helped weak clubs or both has been argued for sixty years. What is not disputed is that it changed who held the bargaining power: before 1965 the player chose among bidders, and after 1965 the player negotiated with one club.
How the first draft worked
The draft was formally called the First-Year Player Draft and is often referred to by the number of the rule that governs it, Rule 4 of the Major League Rules. Today it is commonly called the MLB Draft or the amateur draft. It covered amateur players from the United States and Canada. Players from outside those countries were not included, and neither were players already under contract. Puerto Rico was brought into the pool later, in 1990.
The order gave weaker clubs the earlier picks, with the two leagues alternating. The historical 1964 season sheet shows why Kansas City and the Mets opened the draft: the Athletics finished last in the American League at 57-105, and the Mets finished last in the National League at 53-109. Kansas City picked first and the Mets second. A club's rights to a player it drafted lasted until he signed or until the next draft, in which an unsigned player generally re-entered the pool. That feature mattered most for college players, who could go back to school and be drafted again.
There were also separate phases for previously drafted players. The secondary phase, which ran for decades, allowed clubs to draft players who had been selected earlier but had not signed. The structure has been reshaped many times since 1965, and it is better to check MLB's official site for the rules in force now than to rely on a summary written in the past.
The first draft drew little of the attention the event gets today, but its consequences were large.
Rick Monday, the first pick
Rick Monday was born in Batesville, Arkansas, on November 20, 1945, and played at Arizona State. The historical college table lists him there. He bats and throws left-handed, stood 6 feet 3 and weighed 193 pounds, and his debut came on September 3, 1966, with the Kansas City Athletics, a little over a year after the draft. He had 41 at-bats that first September and hit .098, and 1967 brought his first real chance: 124 games, a .251 average and 14 home runs.
The franchise moved. The Athletics left Kansas City after the 1967 season and became the Oakland Athletics in 1968, which is why Monday's historical line for that year carries a different team code. For the history of that move and the other times the franchise changed cities, see teams that moved: Browns to Orioles, Braves three times and the Athletics three times. Monday played for the A's from 1966 through 1971, was an All-Star in 1968, and hit .290 in 1970.
In 1972 he was traded to the Chicago Cubs, where he played through 1976. His best seasons came there. In 1973 he hit 26 home runs and in 1974 he batted .294. In 1976 he hit 32 home runs and drove in 77, both career highs. In 1976 he also did the thing for which many people remember him: on April 25, in a game at Dodger Stadium, he ran into the outfield and took an American flag away from two men who had tried to set it on fire. It is a famous moment in baseball history and has no connection to his statistics.
The Cubs traded Monday to the Dodgers before the 1977 season, and he spent his last eight years in Los Angeles. He was an All-Star again in 1978, played in the 1977 and 1978 World Series, which the Dodgers lost to the Yankees, and was on the roster when they won in 1981. In that postseason he hit a ninth-inning home run in the deciding game of the National League Championship Series against Montreal. He finished his career on June 20, 1984, with 1,986 games, 6,136 at-bats, 1,619 hits, 248 doubles, 241 home runs, 775 RBI and 98 stolen bases. His career line is .264 with a .361 on-base percentage and a .443 slugging percentage.
Monday was a good major leaguer: 924 walks, 241 home runs and a .361 on-base percentage over 19 seasons. He was not a Hall of Famer, and in 1990 he received 2 votes out of 444 on his only Hall of Fame ballot. A first overall pick does not need to be a Hall of Famer to be a success. A reader should see him as a solid first choice, not a miss, but not the best player in the class by a wide margin.
The class of 1965 in a table
The same draft produced two players who went much further.
| Player | Draft position | Debut | Career highlights in the historical record |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rick Monday | First pick, Kansas City | 1966 | 1,619 H, 241 HR, 2 All-Star games |
| Johnny Bench | Second round, Cincinnati | 1967 | 2,048 H, 389 HR, 1,376 RBI, 14 All-Star games, 2 MVP awards, 10 Gold Gloves, Hall of Fame 1989 |
| Nolan Ryan | 12th round, New York Mets | 1966 | 324 wins, 5,714 strikeouts, 8 All-Star games, Hall of Fame 1999 |
Bench was the National League Rookie of the Year in 1968, won Most Valuable Player awards in 1970 and 1972, and was the World Series MVP in 1976. He won ten consecutive Gold Gloves from 1968 through 1977, and the historical award list shows he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1989 with 431 of 447 votes. He caught for the Reds teams that won World Series in 1975 and 1976. In the history of the position, he is among the best.
Ryan, taken in the 12th round by the Mets, debuted in 1966 and pitched until 1993. His historical pitching line is 324-292 with a 3.19 earned-run average, 5,714 strikeouts in 5,386 innings and 61 shutouts. He won the World Series in 1969 with the Mets, was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1999 with 491 of 497 votes, and pitched for Houston from 1980 to 1988, where he is the club's career strikeout leader. Most of that Houston run was played in the Astrodome.
None of that makes the first pick a mistake. Monday was a good selection by any ordinary measure. It makes the draft a lottery in which the odds are better at the top, but where the best result may arrive late. Bench was chosen after dozens of other players, and Ryan after hundreds. The pattern was true in 1965 and has been true in every draft since.
What the next draft showed
If one draft could be a fluke, the second one reinforced the lesson. In 1966 the Mets selected a catcher named Steve Chilcott with the first overall pick. Chilcott never reached the major leagues. With the second pick, the Athletics selected Reggie Jackson, who reached the Hall of Fame. The comparison is famous because it shows how thin the margin can be between a star and a bust, and why clubs treat the draft as a set of probabilities, not certainties.
Modern analytics have tried to turn the draft into a more predictable process, and the story of how clubs have changed their methods, including the effort to value college statistics against raw tools, is told in the 2002 draft and what Moneyball got right and wrong. The central finding there and in the 1965 example is the same: even the best evaluators miss often, and a draft is a game of managing risk.
How the draft changed baseball
The draft changed four things that are visible in the record.
First, it moved bargaining power from the player to the club. An amateur could no longer shop his services. A player could refuse to sign and wait for the next draft, but if he wanted to start his professional career he had one club to deal with. That structural shift is the basis of arguments that the draft holds down what amateurs earn, arguments that continue in discussions of bonus pools and international signings. The long history of how bonuses were regulated, from draft-and-follow rules to the pool system, is in the history of the amateur draft and signing bonuses.
Second, it made player development a larger part of the business. Once clubs held the rights to draftees, they invested in coaches, instruction and minor-league systems to turn raw talent into major leaguers. The articles on how teams develop hitters in the minors and how teams develop pitchers in the minors describe what that work looks like today.
Third, it gave the weakest clubs a structural route to improvement, though not a guaranteed one. A bad team could pick first, but it still had to choose the right player, sign him and develop him, and the many first picks who never became stars are a reminder of how hard that is.
Fourth, it made the draft itself a news event. What began as a private meeting in 1965 became a televised event, and the picks are now followed by fans, analysts and fantasy players. The draft and prospects topic page collects current coverage, and the college baseball pages and minor-league pages follow the players after they are chosen.
The draft since 1965, in brief
The draft has been rewritten many times, and anything written about its current form is best checked against MLB's official site. As of the 2025 season, a few features are widely known: the draft is held in July, in conjunction with the All-Star festivities; it runs 20 rounds; non-playoff clubs take part in a lottery to determine the top picks; and each club has a bonus pool that limits what it can spend on its picks without penalty. Competitive-balance picks are given to smaller-market clubs. The draft is limited to players in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, and players from other countries enter professional baseball through a separate signing system. The case for and against extending the draft to them is in the international draft debate.
The system of 1965 had none of this. It had one list, one order and no pool, and the clubs were left to negotiate. That plainness is what makes it a useful place to start.
Common questions
Who was the first player taken in the first MLB draft? Rick Monday, an outfielder from Arizona State, was the first pick, selected by the Kansas City Athletics in June 1965.
Which Hall of Famers came from the first draft? Johnny Bench, taken in the second round by the Reds, and Nolan Ryan, taken in the 12th round by the Mets, were both elected to the Hall of Fame, in 1989 and 1999.
Why did baseball adopt a draft? To limit the signing bonuses that clubs were paying to amateurs and to give weaker clubs a better chance at young talent. How well it worked on either count is still debated.
Were international players in the first draft? No. The draft covered amateur players in the United States and Canada, and Puerto Rico was added later.
Did the first pick become a star? Monday had a long and productive career, with 241 home runs and two All-Star selections, but he was not a Hall of Famer.
Where to go next
To see how clubs turn drafted players into major leaguers, read how teams develop hitters in the minors and how teams develop pitchers in the minors. For a later landmark in the draft's history, see the 2002 draft. The article on what minor-league rule experiments taught MLB shows how the farm system became a testing ground, and how the MLB postseason works explains the October stage that draftees hope to reach.