The term overdraft is used by some people to describe the phenomenon where a team drafts a player much higher than the consensus says his talent warrants.
Back in the late 1990s/early 2000s I did a study where I was able to show that, in the first 3 rounds (top 100 picks, actually) players who were drafted too high based on on their consensus rankings turned out worse than players who were drafted near or above their composite ranking.
We are in 2023 and I am here to say, based on recent data I have looked at, that the term overdraft has become archaic. By that I mean that it no longer applies.
I think the advanced metrics that teams use to help them make the correct picks has taken a lot of the 'gut feeling' out of the drafting process. Certain paradigms are developing over the years on what types of players will be successful for a particular team. For example, Cleveland is infatuated with drafting good sized college pitchers with good command and control who they feel they can add significantly to their fastball velocity. This has produced pitchers like LT Allen, Bibee and now, Gavin Williams.
What I currently believe is that some teams just don't get what types of players they can and cannot develop. For example, the Guardians are, generally, not developing their high school position player draft picks. In fact, the HS position players who do develop are more the exception than the rule.
I also believe is that the Guardians, in particular, in the 2022 draft, picked too many guys who were, essentially, clones of Steven Kwan and Will Brennan, based on the premise that these players were likely to be safe bets as high floor/low ceiling, major league starters down the road.
But that's not the same thing as an overdraft which, to me, is a situation where a team goes with its gut instead of following where the data leads it. I think that teams that fail at the draft are generally just picking the wrong players from a group that consensus would say are appropriate. In addition, in many cases where a team picks someone no one projected to go that high, that draft pick tends to be a success rather than a failure.
So, why do I think that there is no long such a thing as an overdraft?
Looking back over the top 100 picks in every draft from 2017 to 2019, a pattern develops. Without going into the detailed analysis of those years, suffice it to say that most teams picked pretty close to the ratings from MLB Pipeline but when they were wildly different, they DID NOT fail as much as you would suspect. In fact, although the number of data points are smaller, teams that 'overdrafted' players tended to fail at about the same rate as teams that picked a player ranked about where their draft slot was.
How does this apply to the Cleveland Guardians? Let's look at their top draft picks over the above time span and see how they were ranked and how they were drafted. As these are Cleveland Guardians prospects, it will be obvious as to how these picks are working out.
2017, Quentin Holmes, ranked 33rd, picked 64th
2017, Tyler Freeman, ranked 141, picked 71st
2017 Jonathon Rodriguez, unranked, picked 102
2018, Bo Naylor, ranked 29th, picked 27th
2018, Ethan Hankins. ranked 21st, picked 35th
2018, Lenny Torres, Jr. ranked 47th, picked 41st
2018, Nick Sandlin, ranked 164th, picked 67th
2018, Richie Palacios, ranked 134th, picked 102nd
2019, Daniel Espino, ranked 24th, picked 23rd
2019, Yordys Valdes, ranked 82nd, picked 63rd
2019, Joe Naranjo, ranked 142nd, picked 101st.
Extending this to 2020 which history will likely tell us is confounded by COVID and short evaluation periods, some of the same patterns still are present:
2020, Carson Tucker, ranked 52nd, picked 23rd
2020, Tanner Burns, ranked 28th, picked 36th
2020, Logan T. Allen, ranked 46th, picked 56th
2020, Petey Halpin, ranked 76th, picked 95th.
Look at Freeman and Holmes. The former was a classic overdraft and the latter would have been considered a 'steal' based on draft slot and pre-draft ranking. Ditto for Jonathon Rodriguez who may still turn out to not be a major league-quality player, but has, at least, wildly exceeded expectations based on his low pre-draft ranking. Obviously the Cleveland draft picks in the top 100 over these 4 years contain the typical injury confounders (Hankins, Torres Jr. and, to some extent, Tucker and, we hope not, Danel Espino) which really messes with your head if you are trying to figure out this overdraft thing. Not saying that he is a solid major league reliever yet, but Nick Sandlin being the 164th ranked player looked like a clear overdraft at the time he was drafted in the third round of 2018 but he has had significant success so far. Maybe he could have been drafted a round later or even two, but his success would have still far exceeded his ranking.
I think what we CAN glean from this data, and especially the data on the Guardians drafts, is that teams are getting better at identifying players pre-draft who will have success but tend to be bad at developing CERTAIN kinds of players. It is obvious from the above data points that the Guardians are generally pathetic at developing HS hitters, thus explaining why their international free agent signings are very position-player heavy. They do develop some HS hitters (Freeman and maybe Halpin and definitely Lindor) but they have had so many failures with HS hitters they drafted highly (e.g., Tucker, Valdes, Naranjo and, going back further, Bobby Bradley) that it has really impacted our major league roster as you can see by the Guardians' current struggles to score runs.
They are much better at drafting college pitchers but when they can't up their velocity (e.g., Tanner Burns) they are left with guys who lack the stuff to compete at the ML level. Even Logan T. Allen is lacking the killer fastball that would make him successful and has to rely on his pitchability traits, leading to a lot of hard contact. However, bottom line, their strategy around drafting college pitchers has been VERY successful.
Look, not every draft pick is a success story. Some guys get hurt, some guys don't develop, However my recent work tells me that, as much as I would like to, I can no longer in good conscious use the term overdraft because, due to advances in analyzing players, a simple ranking doesn't tell the whole story.
To make the Guardians' drafts more productive, they simply need to do a better job of developing hitters or stop drafting them and draft college and a few HS pitchers and, after developing them, trade them to other teams for the position players those teams developed. Continuing to make draft 'mstakes' which are really not draft mistakes but, rather, player development failures, is going to weaken our major league teams down the years.
The draft is approaching so in my next post I will start to assimilate what I have learned in the first 7 posts in this series and, in looking at the players available in this year's draft, start thinking about who might be available and who the Guardians might consider drafting.
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