2023 Amateur Draft - Part 1: Is The Draft A Crapshoot and How It Looks to Me Like the Guardians Mitigate Limitations of the Draft

 Wow, that was the longest title for a blog post in the history of my blog.

Let's talk today about the statement "The baseball draft is just a crapshoot".  How much of that is fact, how much of it is falsehood or is it somewhere in between?

There are 3 basic questions about every player drafted:

(a) How well will an amateur player's skills project into his success in professional baseball?

(b) How well will an organization be able to develop and enhance those skills to make the player successful?

(c) Can a player be signed for a reasonable bonus, based on his skills and projectability?

The answers to those three questions, as well as the luck of who is available when a team drafts, is what shapes a team's draft and, generally (not considering confounders like injuries), leads to the success or failure of that draft.

But how, in hindsight, do you measure whether you are doing a good job drafting players who are YEARS away from the majors.  There is so much anecdotal research that people have done on the first-year player draft in baseball that it takes a while to sift through it and, when you do, this data does not have a way to consider confounders, things unexpected at draft time that occur after the draft.    Maybe the player is hurt when they are drafted and it is more serious than first thought or gets hurt after the draft.  Maybe that player just doesn't thrive in a particular system.  Finally, maybe the organization just got it wrong when they drafted a player.  

In the last couple of years a new confounder may have emerged with the Guardians where they look for a particular type of player (college pitchers with great command, left-handed college hitters with good contact rates and plate discipline).  Those traits then shape their draft.  In my opinion, this thought process likely will deliver more low ceiling/high floor guys.  At the same time it is likely to deliver a few high draft picks who are head scratchers who will be more painful 'busts' if they fail than high ceiling, low floor guys who you KNOW can fail but if they hit...they can become franchise cornerstones like Francisco Lindor.

Forgetting these most recent confounders derived from the analytics age, lets focus for a second on confounders that have existed for years.  Guys like Matt Whitney (catastrophic injury), JD Martin (great changeup, couldn't develop his fastball), Cody Bunkelman (classic overdraft who was not scouted well enough), Shane Beiber/Tanner Bibee (fastball velocity increase projected at draft time was achieved), Francisco Lindor (skill set develops at a normal rate and projected power developed), Brady Aiken (organization just got it wrong).  These guys are great examples of players who would be confounders both positively (Beiber, Bibee and Lindor) and negatively (Whitney, Martin, Bunkelman, Aiken) to any analysis.    

On the other hand, guys like Civale and Kwan represent a different grouping.  They fall into the category of guys who were drafted with hopes that they could maximize their limited abilities, the classic high floor/low ceiling guys.  Basically, these guys were essentially what draft analyses are all about: did a team get value for a particular player pick at a particular slot, with high floor, low ceiling guys dominating in the middle rounds and guys with one dominant tool filling in the later rounds with the hope that the other tools could be brought up to a level to make that one dominant tool playable in the majors.  The first 2-3 rounds still have to be reserved for guys who have a chance to impact your team like a Francisco Lindor did IF they develop as you thought they should.

The movie Can't Hit The Curve with Clint Eastwood is a good example of how a scout's gut was entrenched in and most important in the decision making of who to draft all the way up to probably 2015.  Most of the studies I will reference here looked at data before 2015 as it isn't really known whether a player is going to make the majors or be successful there until at least 6-7 years after they are drafted.  Thus, the effectiveness of recent changes to how draft prospects are rated cannot be incorporated in what is published regarding draft trends.

Neverthesless, what have people been able to glean from older (2015 and before) draft results over the years given all these provisos?   

• Between 66-73% of players drafted in the first round eventually make the majors.  It drops off in later rounds with about 50% in round 2, 40% (round 3), 35% (round 4), 30% (round 5). 18-25% in rounds 6-10 and about 10% in rounds 11-20.
• As measured by WAR, there isn't much difference between future ML success by whether a player in drafted in slots 1-5, 6-10 or 10-15 in the first round.  In the back half of the first round, however, there is a clear difference in how successful those first round draft choices end up being.  Players with relatively high yearly WARs (2.5 or greater) represent only about 12% of first rounders and less after that.  The average WAR for guys drafted in the first round who made the majors was around 7 for round 1 and dropping down to between 1.5 and 3.3 for players who signed in rounds 2-10.  
• Players drafted from 1996 to 2011 in rounds 1-10 had a slightly smaller chance to make the majors and be successful than players drafted from 1965 to 1995, indicating that more advanced scouting techniques and the use of analytics didn't change the outcome.   Obviously, more advanced scouting tools may increase the percentage of draftees who make the majors but, for right now, it is just as likely that we have reached the best possible outcome with the players who don't make the majors simply being failures based on injury or inability to develop and there may not be a scouting tool to avoid that.  So when people talk about the draft being a crapshoot it may be this small percentage of the guys who don't make it that they are talking about.
• There are 4 types of players who are drafted: college pitchers, college hitters, high school pitchers and high school hitters.
• In round 1 college players are more likely to make it to the majors and to have a ML career (3+ season).  College hitters are slightly more likely to have success than college pitchers.  HS hitters a slightly more likely than HS pitchers to have a long ML career.  The range in groups from highest to lowest is 78 to 57% for making the majors and 55 to 32% for having a long career.
• In round 2 these same trends hold but the differences between college players compared to HS players is bigger, as is the increased chances of success of hitters (both college and HS) compared to their peer pitchers.  The range for making the majors is 67 to 46% for making the majors and 44 to 32% for having a long career.
• In round 3, less HS players are signed by teams but the percentage of them who make the majors and have a long career are almost identical to their college peer group.  the rates for making it to majors is about 40% for all groups and in the high 20s for having a long career.
• The trends seen in the 3rd round continue into the 4th round but HS pitchers and college hitters drafted in this round have a better chance to have long ML careers than HS hitters and college pitchers.  the range is 42 to 32% to make the majors and 22 to 14% for having a long career.
• I did an unpublished study years ago that showed that, using a reputable rating system (e.g., Fangraphs, MLB Pipeline, Baseball America) that if a team drafted a player in the first round who was rated 15+ spots below where they were drafted (i.e., an overdraft) they were much less likely to make the majors than if that team drafted a player who was rated near or higher than their draft slot.  In the 2nd and 3rd rounds the same thing held but it was for a player drafted 20+ spots higher than their rating.  In the 4th and 5th rounds there was less data as fewer players eventually made it to the majors but the trends were the similar to the first round, just 30+ places being the cutoff.

So, there are the raw numbers.   If you crunch just those numbers a little further here is what you have on the surface:

• Given that Cleveland gets the competitive balance pick every year, from every draft they should get 5 guys who make the majors (add the % of guys who make the majors in each round including that competitive balance pick and divide that total by 100)
• If they draft predominantly college players that number should go up 6 per draft.
• Again, if they draft predominantly college players they should expect to have 3-4 of those players have long (3+ years) careers.  If they draft a mix of college and HS players, it likely will be closer to 3 per draft.

These numbers are independent of confounders but those confounders can still skew WHERE in a draft you get these long-term major leagues from.  You would have to do a player-by-player analysis of why each did or didn't make the majors to do what people have done so far and, as far as I can tell, no one has done this deep of a dive.  For example, did Aaron Civale make the majors based on his skillset and natural development?  Likely.  Did Beiber become a star because he improved his skillset (READ: fastball velo) after the draft?  Likely.  Was he going to have peaked out where Civale did without this bump in skills?  Likely.  Did both of them end up where historical trends say these should have, everything else being equal?  Very likely.  

So, looking at the above numbers, I think the baseball draft is not a sure thing.  However, confounders really cloud whether and, if so, how much the draft is a crapshoot.  Instead of being a crapshoot, the statistics above would indicate that the lack of major leaguers coming out of each draft is related to the limited number of players in each draft that even have the talent to make the major leagues, even if everything (injury, ability to be developed) falls their way.  We all should realize that the draft in later rounds is there to fill out the rosters so the players who have a true chance to play in the majors have a team to play for as they move up the minors.    If you happen to get the occasional major leaguer from these late round draftees that's great.  But, even if they don't make the majors, they serve a good purpose.  What shouldn't happen is for people assume that the draft is a crapshoot JUST because so few players who are drafted make the majors.   

I think the truth is if you are getting 70% of your first rounders to the majors and 50% of your second rounders to the majors the draft is not a crapshoot.  Confounders, limitations in talented players to be drafted and poor choices in draft picks make the draft look more like a crapshoot than it really is.  You generally get your drafted star players from the first 2 rounds of the draft.  If you go for the brass ring and draft high ceiling/low floor guys with those picks you are bound to get burned by confounders more often, which leads to the illusion of the draft being a crapshoot.

Look, the Guardians need to be at or near the top of each draft given that they are not spending money on free agents or even on highly priced international signees.  Fail one draft and their prospect pipeline is in trouble.  Blow two drafts in a row and you are likely looking at a rebuild in the future.  Blow 3 drafts in a row and you are the Indians of the '70s.  One confounder we have not talked about is if teams go over their draft budgets.  The Guardians DO tend to do that so that is something that is in their favor IF they draft the right guys.  I do question in the last draft whether paying Jacob Zibin over $1 million as a 10th round pick was a good idea.

I think what you can glean from all the studies that I looked at is that you take the best player available, not the best player available who fits your mold for what a good player is or the player with the highest ceiling.  In early rounds there are probably at least 3-4 choices at your slot who are quality for that slot.  You pick the one that is closest to your ideal draft pick (i.e., a skillset you can develop (e.g., pitchability college pitchers who have room to increase velocity), good temperament and injury history, signable) but you don't go outside that range just because you feel that a particular group (left handed hitting college hitters, good command college pitchers) is your flavor of the month just because you have a player or two you drafted/acquired who happen to fit that profile and has been successful (e.g., Brennan, Kwan).  In later rounds you make low ceiling, high floor guys and in much later rounds you pick players with one dominant tool who you feel you can develop their other tools.  You won't hit on every pick (confounders) but you won't blow a draft, either.