Q. Where can I find some resources about athletes going directly from high school to the pros?

There is not a lot of academic material available about the controversy surrounding high school athletes going directly to the pros, especially about baseball players in particular.  The majority of material about the issue appears to focus on basketball players, perhaps because it does not have a minor league like baseball.

The best databases to find articles on this topic are our Issues & Controversies databases.  Issues & Controversies and Opposing Viewpoints are good databases with which to start.

A search in Gale Academic OneFile for "major league baseball" AND "high school" produced this article that talks about high school draftees and gives statistics.

One possible way to find information about the issue is to seek out resources about specific athletes who went professional after high school, and use their personal experiences or behavior as possible examples of the effects of going pro at that age.  Click here to see the MLB's Draft Tracker that lists players who were drafted each year and what school they came from all the way back to 1965.

Another way to approach the search is to seek out resources on indirectly related issues, such as steroid use among high schoolers or college recruitment practices.

There are also many more resources (blogs, articles) about the issue available from non-academic sources that can be accessed through popular search engines like Google.  Of course, the quality of sources found this way is questionable, so you should evaluate any sources found this way using these criteria.