Worst First Round Picks in Wankdorf History

With the draft being a mere 48 hours away, let's take a ride down memory lane for a few minutes and review the wayward ways of our past. With a league that started in 2002, we're now coming up on our 7th draft, which means there have been six opportunities for players to shoot themselves in the foot by fouling up valuable first round picks. What have been the worst of the first rounders? Let's take a look-see:

2002: With all due respect to Mike Piazza, Sammy Sosa and Mark Mulder, who at least were useful for a short period of time after this draft, the hands down winner has to be Roberto Alomar. As members of the Original Seven may recall, this year we did "simultaneous drafting", where everyone names a player at once that they wanted. FOUR people wanted Alomar. I need not remind everyone that he joined the Mets that year and proceeded to make Carlos Baerga look saintly.

Bonus bad pick: Val took Bret Boone in the second round. Two minutes after drafting Nomar Garciaparra. If you were trying to find the antithesis of Whitaker-Trammell, you did it.

2003: This will forever be known as the Mo Vaughn Draft. I don't need to belabor the details.

2004: My efforts to find a draft results sheet have resulted in nothing; however, I distinctly remember Ironhead taking Vincente Padilla in the first round, two picks before Jake and I took Ben Sheets and David Ortiz, respectively. I think Padilla was cut before Mother's Day.

2005: For reasons that we're still trying to decipher, our beloved commish decided to lead off his draft day by taking Jason Giambi, who had already had a staph infection and showed up to spring training looking deflated. God, I miss the good ol' days of rampant HGH abuse.

2006: Our former leaguemate Michael decided to use his 4th pick on Jason Schmidt and an HMO with Oxford Medical. This wasn't epic bad, but went a long was to explaining why his team never rose above 6th place.

Bonus bad pick: Jon took Placido Polanco to lead off the second round. That was dumb.

2007: It's only one year out, but I think it's safe to say the fact that B.J. Ryan pitched exactly 4 1/3 innings forM**e last year makes him the worst player on this list. Which is saying something: the bottom of last year's draft included Hideki Matsui's cranky legs, Troy Glaus' strained groin and the immortal Dick Harden. Still, at least those teams didn't lose their owners.

The scary part? We could draft 9 guys in the first round this year who would be worse than any of these picks and all of the picks would be defensible at the time. So buckle down for the crapfest known as the '08 draft kids, it's gonna be rough.