Draft Day Predictions: Serious Business

I’ve been pretty busy the last few days, so this post may be a little shorter than normal. Use the extra time to do something productive, like feng shui, or writing the Great American Novel, or something (or commenting here, if that’s too time-consuming).

Anyway, as you may have heard the 2012 Draft was earlier this week! Exciting times for everyone involved. I, personally, am looking forward to 2017, when the Orioles (led by Kevin Gausman) and the Cardinals (led by Michael Wacha and Stephen Piscotty) meet in the World Series.

But wait! Rob Neyer points out that the MLB Network was a little overly-optimistic in their projections of the drafted players.

MLB's Borderline-Insane New Draft Gimmick

So, did you hear that MLB has a new draft pick lottery thing? Yep, as part of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, Selig made sure to fix that much-squabbled about problem of who gets the picks after the first round of the draft.

I don’t want to say this is the dumbest thing in baseball history; baseball has had numerous dumb things in history. There’s this. These. Most of these. This and this (you’ll know them when you see them). Yeah, not to beat the point into the ground, but if you’re looking for dumb things, there are worse. But I’m not sure how many of them rival the Competitive Balance Lottery on things like poor planning, inexplicability, or sheer out-of-nowhereness.

Granted, people had issues with the draft. The Free Agent type rankings were a mess, most of the owners wanted to curb spending on amateurs, some people wanted to add countries to the draft or remove them, and so on. Nowhere did I hear anything about teams needing more picks or less picks or anything like that.

Studying the First and Second Rounds of the Draft: What Can You Expect?

I’ve still been thinking a lot about the draft, so I decided to take one more quick look at it in a different way. I looked at the first and second round drafts from 1990 through 2005 (I needed players with some history in the majors) and looked at each year’s best players and when they were picked. More specifically, I went through Baseball Reference’s draft database, sorted each first round and second round by Wins Above Replacement (WAR), and marked down the top three players for the first round and top player for the second round. All of this was to see what picks in the first round usually yield the best results.


Via request, I also noted how many first round picks made the majors, how many had positive career values, and how many have reached certain career WAR marks. For the WAR numbers, I mostly stuck to round numbers to approximate various levels of success (5 as a sort of journeyman/bit part player, 10 for a bit player with some success, and 20 for a player that had at least some all-star years). I’m not positive if these exact numbers are right, but they should at least provide an estimate. Also note that, as I move forward, the numbers will start to skew as more and more active players are included.

What Makes a Successful Draft: Pitchers

So, in my last piece, I looked at what contributes to a successful draft, as far as drafting hitters goes. Today, I’m investigating the obvious follow-up: what type of success can you expect out of pitching draft picks?
I used the same process as with the hitters: I sorted through each of the last eleven season on Baseball-Reference.com to find the fifteen pitchers with the most Wins Above Replacement per season, then found what round and overall number they were drafted.
Again, there are a few things that I noticed:

What Makes a Draft Successful: Hitters

Major League Baseball’s draft is fast approaching-it starts this Monday. in preparation of that, I decided to ask a question that has been asked before, but research it in my own way just to demonstrate the value of drafting: what type of success can you expect out of draft picks?

Everyone knows that the first round picks are the most important, and it’s fairly obvious why. The players taken first should, in theory, be the best ones. But just how much better? If you’re team doesn’t have a pick until the later half of the first round, could it still strike gold? Well, yes, but it might be harder than you think.

My methodology was looking at the top 25 position players for each of the last eleven years (from 2000 to 2010) and compare them against their position in the draft. As a quick reference, I used Baseball-Reference.com and sorted top position players by Wins Above Replacement, or WAR. WAR calculates a players total contributions through batting, fielding, games played, and position, although here it was mostly used as a quick way to find a years best set of players. Then, I figured out what round and pick number each of those players was drafted (or, if they were an international free agent, marked them as such). Then, I did some rough tabulations on the data. I came across the following data: