If you’re anything like me—and I realize that on a night stuffed fat with Lakers/Magic and Red Wings/Penguins, you might’ve had something better to do—you tuned into the MLB Player Draft on Tuesday expecting baseball-wonk nirvana. You hoped to be enlightened about the next generation of Sizemores, even if their big-league ETA might be 2012. You hoped against hope that Bob Costas would show up and commandeer the proceedings, cackling with the relish of a Bond villain as he stuffed the other hosts in a linen closet.

Instead, you got a rote recitation of the drafted players, complete with odd-angle clips and endless prattle about “tools.” It was the professional sports draft as envisioned by some producer whose sports-as-entertainment education ended when “Wide World of Sports” went off the air. It wasn’t boring so much as directionless.

After the opening Strasburgasm and the inevitable 18 minutes of “this guy pitches better than Chopin composes études” hype, the draft telecast descended into please-God-let-the-next-pick-come-soon-because-we’ve-got-nothing-left-to-talk-about banter. I realize this isn’t the fault of the broadcasting entity, as most casual fans have no idea who the draftees are. After all, unlike potential NFL and NBA draftees, they haven’t invaded households across the country on Saturday afternoon or during a three-week stretch in March, and are thus inherently less interesting than your average “American Idol” flameout.

But really: we’re restocking organizational cupboards here. There’s gotta be a way to make this more palatable to, say, baseball fans. How, you ask? By doing the following four things.

1. Tell me why I should care: I’m not asking for softly focused in-depth profiles of those draftees with interesting back stories—the kid whose dad died in a tragic balance-beam mishap, the one who skipped from homeless shelter to homeless shelter because mommy was on the pipe, etc. No, I want to know what each of the picks means for the organization that made it.

The Pirates were beaten up by the pundits for snaring a catcher, Tony Sanchez, with the fourth pick overall. They argued that Sanchez should’ve gone 10-12 picks later, which is their right, but didn’t bother to explain what the Pirates may have been thinking. Maybe the organization is low on major-league ready backstops, so a polished college product was an ideal fit for them. Maybe he promised to sign for $125 and a truckload of taffy. Who knows? We sure as hell don’t.

2. Give me translations: OK, so the Mariners drafted first baseman Dustin Ackley, who has hit .400 or higher for three straight seasons at North Carolina. Wonderful. But who’d he do it against? How high was the caliber of play in the ACC during his time there? How does what he did compare with what similar super-duper-prospects did at other colleges, or in high school?

Last night, we got nary an iota of context, so all we had to go on were the “this kid can hit with a capital ‘H’!” raves from salivating prospect stalkers (prospecteers?). Baseball is way good with numbers nowadays, so somebody out there should place the garish stats in their proper context.

3. Media-train the damn kids: This one is on players’ families and representatives, rather than whoever’s staging the draft. I don’t know what would’ve happened if somebody had shoved a microphone in my face when I was 18 and asked me to respond intelligently to a series of questions (actually, I do: I’d have frozen up, then spent the rest of the afternoon self-flagellating and losing myself in a fifth of Popov Vodka, “Hoboken’s Finest”). All I know is that NFL and NBA prospects—hell, even NHL ones who have never left Saskatchewan—rarely come across as hayseed and stuttery as most of last night’s interviewees did.

4. Lacquer up Mel Kiper Jr.’s mane and get him on camera: Or not. But whoever produces the 2010 MLB Draft should search far and wide for Kiper’s baseball equivalent, somebody who knows the players and the folks doing the drafting, and can thus opine with something akin to intelligence. The obvious candidate for this role is ESPN’s Keith Law, but he may be too smart and well-rounded for the gig; he, like, reads and stuff. Maybe the Baseball Prospectus folks can nudge their prospect guru, Kevin Goldstein, camera-ward? We don’t need more personality; we need more authority.