Something that bothered me a great deal when we were covering the draft was how pervasive the idea of the draft being a crapshoot was. After pouring over a lot of scouting material I was convinced that it wasn’t and I thought that given time and energy, it was completely plausible to determine who were the best bets. I use the term bets on purpose because while not a crapshoot, the draft also isn’t an easy task. While this idea that it was too early to evaluate the Cardinals’ (or anyone’s) draft wasn’t necessarily espoused here, it was prevalent in several other places.
What I’m leading up to is that Kevin Goldstein is starting a series over at BP looking at the defensive spectrum and draftees. It’s behind the shroud of subscription but I really, really want to drop this small tidbit that he has in his precursor/methodology article to the actual articles:
One of those statements that gets thrown around way too often is the assumption that the draft is a crapshoot. Yes, it’s a riskier proposition than both the NFL and NBA versions, where players come right into stardom, but that doesn’t mean it’s anything but a totally blind throw of a dart. Looking at the top 50 hitters in the game, as measured by VORP, one gets this:
Draft, High School: 17 34.0% Draft, College: 14 28.0% Draft, JUCO 5 10.0% FA – Latin America 12 24.0% FA – Asia 2 4.0%Now you understand why teams like those high-ceiling high school players. In addition, of those 17 players in the VORP top 50 who got drafted out of high school, a whopping 14 of them were drafted in the first round.
Ahhh, I feel better now. I love it when people who are smarter than me (or at least have more resources available to them) substantiate things I’m passionate about. Consider that particular itch scratched.
In other news, how ’bout that Rick Ankiel? I’ve got my Move Him On Up: Memphis Hitters review ready for early this week but before I spout off, what does everyone else think his upside is in the major leagues? Are we talking bench player, solid regular, occasional All-Star. . . he’s really at his peak now according to most aging curves so how long do you think he stays in the majors? (I think we’re past the question of whether he’ll ever get there.)
Filed under: 2007 Draft, Rick Ankiel
erik
azruavatar
fewgoodcards
roarke49
theredbaaron
Upside would be solid regular. I’d expect to see him as a decent contributor for 3-4 years and then a platoon player.
meh. Every year there are ~30 first round draft picks. The fact that, over the last 20 or so years of drafting that players who are in the big leagues right now are represented by, 22 first round draftees (out of what, 400 or so? need more data) have become “top 50 players according to VORP” in the big leagues does not mean that it was not a crapshoot when trying to figure out which individual players would become stars. 375 (or 200, or whatever) first round draft choices did not make his list of top 50.
In general the hoopla surrounding the draft was from people claiming that “player x is a sure thing, if we don’t draft player x we are not making the best choice for the team”. But there is no sure thing, and this particular study in no way proves that.
Azru, good stuff as usual. But a couple comments that the statistical side of me can’t ignore:
I wouldn’t use the top-50 VORP to try to make this point (I realize you are just repeating Goldstein). 50 is a really small subsample of major league hitters, and VORP can bounce around an awful lot from year to year. 17 vs. 14 could very easily be reversed a year from now, and then where is Goldstein’s argument - that college hitters are now more likely to be a better choice? Methinks it’s better to use either a much larger subset (top 200 VORP?), or some measure that can be spread among years (>30 VORP over last 5 years?). Remember, also, that it doesn’t mean much to report the % of the category leaders, either, unless you also report what proportion of the opportunity (i.e., the draft selections) they represent - if high schoolers make up twice as many draft picks as any other category of player, then we ought to also see them represented twice as much in everything at the MLB level - whether among All-Star rosters, fielding errors, or times ejected by umpires. There are simply twice as many in the pipeline.
The 14 out of 17 is somewhat interesting in that it means teams are apparently pretty good at grabbing the better talent in the 1st round than in later rounds…but honestly, saying that THAT’S where the crapshoot is is a straw-man argument - it seems pretty well accepted to me that players taken earlier in the draft do better than players taken later. Its the College vs HS vs Import “crapshoot” that seems a lot harder to parse.
Sleepy and Sidd you both have good points. . . and I don’t necessarily have good answers. It’s almost enough to make me want to spend the hours doing the research myself. We’ll see if I have time. I’m with Sidd that it does show teams are good at picking out top talent in that first round. I’ll have to poke around for a record of all the old drafts and do some number crunching on those first rounders (if I can find the time).
Sleepy, I still don’t like the dismissive nature that a lot of people took re: disagreeing with the Cardinals pick. I still don’t like that pick and too many people just threw their hands up in the air and said “it’s too early, we don’t know anything”. That’s not accurate imo.
I’m interested to see what Goldstein’s further articles look like because I’m just not sure I have the readily adaptable data set to further dissect his numbers. (Or a research team behind me.)