Somehow I never realized how much of a crapshoot the actual game of craps is until this weekend, when I stood near a table in Atlantic City and learned the rules of craps. It’s really just betting on dice rolls. Total crapshoot. It’s not just a clever name.

So it’s not really fair to call the MLB draft a crapshoot, because it’s not like the Mets could choose just anyone with that seventh overall pick and expect equal odds of a reasonable return. Matt Harvey has a much better chance of turning into a legitimate Major Leaguer than I do because I don’t throw a fastball in the high 90s. So it’s a good thing the Mets didn’t draft me.

But since baseball players are drafted from all sorts of different levels and leagues, there’s no easy way to compare skill levels and obviously no perfect way to project how good a player will become. So yeah, once scouts have poured over thousands of amateur players and identified the ones worth drafting in the first couple of rounds, it does a bit random as to which ones pan out.

Teams and general managers who draft players that become good Major Leaguers are generally credited as good drafters, and there are very likely some scouts with a better sense of projectable Major League talent than others. But such a slim percentage of drafted players become Major Leaguers and even fewer become Major League stars, so it’s damn near impossible to say for certain that any team consistently drafts well. We can point to teams with good draft histories and we can identify the teams that seem to employ the best strategies. That’s really it, though.

For a point of reference, check out the first basemen drafted in the first round in 2008. The Mets selected Ike Davis that year, a pick some fans (predictably) grumbled about but one that seems to be working out.

Davis was one of six first basemen taken in the first round. The first, Eric Hosmer, was out of high school and appears pretty talented, though he’s still a ways off. The second, much-hyped University of Miami product Yonder Alonso, has a .715 OPS across Double- and Triple-A this season.

The third, University of South Carolina’s Justin Smoak, raked in Triple-A earlier this season and is currently starting at first for the Rangers, though without as much success as Davis to date. David Cooper, drafted one pick before Davis out of Cal, has a .675 OPS in Double-A.

Four picks after Davis, the Padres took Allan Dykstra, who is sporting a .698 OPS in High A.

In other words, they’re all over the map. As of now, Hosmer, Smoak and Davis appear to have been good picks and Alonso, Cooper and Dykstra bad ones. So we can credit the Royals, Rangers and Mets for their talent scouting, or we can guess they just got lucky. And really, we still don’t know: All these guys are still young; any of the former three could collapse and any of the latter three could explode.

That’s a long and silly way of saying it’s sort of pointless to get too excited one way or the other about Matt Harvey. I understand that drafting college pitchers is a good strategy, though I don’t know that I’d point to Harvey’s history of 150+ pitch outings as a good sign (as many have). You can’t teach a 98-mph fastball, though, so that’s good.

What I know for certain is that he had an awesome mustache, so, you know, suck on that Chris Sale. Also, I will hold out some slim hope that he breaks with tradition and chooses Weird Al Yankovic’s deep track “Harvey the Wonder Hamster” as his warmup music. And it’d be cool if he’s good, too.