Postseason baseball has us thinking about the time we drafted an MLB Hall of Famer #lakings #hockey
Here’s the story of a Hall of Fame player drafted by the LA Kings who never played a single NHL game. I’m Josh Schaefer and this is LA Kings Snapshot. Before the 1984 NHL draft, a young forward was absolutely lighting up the high school hockey scene in the state of Massachusetts. He idolized Phil Espazito and Bobby Yor. And in his final high school season, he scored 44 goals and recorded 85 points in just 23 games. And in that 1984 NHL draft, he was selected in the fourth round, 69th overall by the Los Angeles Kings. But there was a problem. He was also a terrific baseball player. And just 4 days earlier, he’d been drafted in the second round of the Major League Baseball draft by the Atlanta Braves. His name was Tom Glavin, and he now had a decision to make. He could go to college to play both hockey and baseball, or he’d choose one over the other right now. Now, the Kings were willing to be patient and see how he developed as a player in school, but the Atlanta Braves were a little bit more aggressive. Glavin was a 6foot left-handed pitcher, and the Braves made him a pitch that he just simply couldn’t refuse. He signed with Atlanta to play baseball, and the rest was history. He was a 10-time All-Star, two-time Sai Young Award winner, the 1995 World Series MVP, and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014. But even Glavin admits that at the time he was drafted, he was probably a more complete hockey player than he was a baseball player. And even he says that if he stuck with hockey, he probably would have been a Hall of Famer there as well. And his reasoning is because 102 picks after he was drafted by the Kings, the Kings selected another Hall of Famer, Luke Robbitai. And that’s the story of how the Kings drafted a Hall of Fame hockey player and baseball player in the same draft. [Applause]
