Ben Cherington watched the NFL Draft with keen interest, not because of his football fandom but rather to “get a flavor” for the setting for a virtual draft.

The Pittsburgh Pirates general manager hopes to pick the brains of the Steelers’ front office personnel sometime before the MLB Draft in July. Although there are distinct differences between the two drafts, Cherington found one thing baseball should consider stealing from football.

“The takeaway I had from watching it is that the NFL, at least in the early rounds, does have baked into their model already a longer time between picks than the MLB Draft typically has. In a virtual setting, that may be something that, as a league, we ought to think about,” Cherington said. “I can imagine, even with as good as technology is, maybe needing a little bit more time to arrange the smaller group conversations or reacting to the pick ahead of you and need a little bit of time to react to that.

“It doesn’t happen that often, but in a normal setting when you’re all in one room, you can react to that pretty quickly. If you need to get a small group to go into the conference room next door, it’s pretty easy to do. Maybe that just takes a little extra time in this setting. I think the pace of it maybe is something to think about, but otherwise, if it happens that way, if it happens virtually, the technology’s probably going to be pretty similar, and I’d love to connect with the Steelers at some point just to see what they’re learning.”

Precision is paramount for the Pirates in this draft. Where the Steelers didn’t own a first-round pick and had only one selection in the first 100, the Pirates have six picks in the first five rounds, including the No. 7 overall selection, three in the first 44 (they have the 31st overall pick, in the competitive balance round) and five in the top 108.

Because of baseball’s shutdown amid the coronavirus crisis, the MLB Players Association agreed to shorten the draft to as few as five rounds, although it could have as many as 40. Baseball has yet to set a definitive date for the draft.

“Exactly what the draft looks like, we’ll just wait and see. We’ll get information from the league,” Cherington said. “The draft is one important event amongst many in a major league season. I think the league and ownership and the (players association) will look at all of those events and decide what’s in the best interest of the industry in 2020.

“It’s obviously an important event for us. We need to prepare to make good selections. We’d always prefer the chance to make more selections than less. Whatever the number of rounds are, our job is going to be to execute on those, perform better than our competitors, no matter how many rounds there are.”

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