As we approach the 2023 First Year Player Draft next month, I wanted to look back over recent Cleveland Guardians' drafts and see how they impacted the current Guardians' ML team and the strength of our farm system.
In a previous piece where I analyzed studies done by others about the draft, a team should expect to get 5-6 players from each draft who make the majors with 3 of them having significant (3+ year) major league careers.
So let's look at how many major leaguers or major prospects the Guardians were able to draft from 2015-2021 (NOTE: the status of the 2022 draft picks will be handled in a separate post). Also included is their 1st-3rd round picks in each year. The guys who made the majors are in bold.
2015 (40 rounds) - 6 guys who played in the majors so far, 3 who have had significant (3+ years in the majors) careers (McKenzie, Haggerty and Mathias)
Brady Aiken (1st round pick)
Triston McKenzie
Juan Hillman (2nd round pick)
Mark Mathias
Ka'ai Tom
Nathan Lukes
Justin Garza
Sam Haggerty
2016 (40 rounds) - 7 MLers, 4 (Jones, Civale, Beiber and Plesac) with significant ML careers so far
Nolan Jones (1st round pick)
Will Benson
Logan Ice
Aaron Civale
Shane Beiber
Connor Capel
Zach Plesac
Tanner Tully
2017 (40 rounds) - 6 MLers, 3 (Morgan, Karinchak, Nelson) with significant careers so far
Quentin Holmes (1st round)
Tyler Freeman
Jonathon Rodriguez
Ernie Clement
Kirk McCarty
Eli Morgan
James Karinchak
Kyle Nelson
2018 (40 rounds) - 6 MLers so far. 0 with significant (3+ years) ML careers so far
Bo Naylor
Ethan Hankins
Lenny Torres Jr.
Nick Sandlin
Steven Kwan
Cody Morris
Bryan Lavastida
Tim Herrin
Other significant guys still in our mnor league system: Adam Scott, Rey Delgado, Thomas Ponticelli, Kyle Marman, Korey Holland, Shane McCarthy.
2019 (40 rounds) - 4 MLers, 0 with significant ML careers so far
Daniel Espino (1st round)
Yordys Valdes
Joe Naranjo
Christian Cairo
Hunter Gaddis
Xzavion Curry
Will Brennan
Kevin Kelly
Other significant guys still in our minor league system:Valdes, Naranjo, Cairo, Jordan Brown, Will Bartlett, Zach Hart, Nick Mikolajchak, Micah Pries, Trey Benton, Nic Enright, Andrew Misiaszek.
2020 (5 rounds) - 1 MLer, 0 guys with significant ML careers so far
Carson Tucker (1st round)
Tanner Burns
Logan T. Allen
Petey Halpin
Milan Tolentino
Mason Hickman
Randy Labout (minor league free agent)
2021 (20 rounds) - 1 MLer so far
Gavin Williams (1st round)
Doug Nikhazy
Tommy Mace
Jake Fox
Ryan Webb
Tanner Bibee
Every single other player drafted is STILL in the Guardians farm system and appears to be making progress except for 20th round pick Jake Miller and Zach Pettway, who are still injured.
SUMMARY
While I might disagree with a number of these picks, the Guardians have been spot on in terms of producing ML players and producing players who are having significant ML careers, if you base that conclusion on the studies that have been done. Looking at those drafts, however, only Beiber and McKenzie stand out as all-star caliber players (maybe Naylor down the road). For a team like Cleveland that can't go out and sign all-star free agents, I think they need to do better. I think the root of this failure to produce all-star talent from the draft is two-fold:
(1) I think the Guardians have failed miserably when they pick HS talent, especially hitters, early. By the statistics I presented before, it is certainly more difficult to get a major leaguer in the first round if you draft a HSer, with HS pitchers being the most difficult. While our current top 30 (MLB Pipeline) contains 4 HS hitter draftees (Naylor, Fox, Tolentino and Halpin) and we have another in the majors (Freeman), none of these guys look like they will be impact players in the majors, even Naylor, who may be an impact player for a catcher but not overall, either offensively or defensively. Given how some of them have cratered this season, guys like Fox and Tolentino may never even make the majors and other top 10 round HS draftees like (Brown, Bartlett, Valdes, Cairo, Naranjo, Tucker and Quentin Holmes) will likely never even get to the majors.
(2) It appears to me that the Guardians are drafting a lot of low ceiling/high floor guys knowing they will likely get SOMETHING out of a lot of them and hoping they can raise the ceiling on some of these guys (e.g., Beiber and Bibee with their increased FB velo). So far this has not produced the type of results with the hitters it has with the pitchers. Kwan, while being a good piece on a good team, is not an impact player and if he makes one all-star team I think that will be a roaring success.
(3) When the Guardians have gone risky by picking high upside HS kids (Espino, Aiken, Tucker, Hillman, Hankins, Torres Jr., and maybe Jonathon Rodriguez) they have produced nothing. This has contributed to the lack of star power you get out of a draft. Some of it is expected with confounders like injuries (Espino, especially) really doing a number on this group. Still, you would have to imagine that we would hit on SOME of these guys and we didn't. Especially for Aiken, Valdes, Cairo and maybe Jones and Benson who appear on these lists, you could probably chalk it up to the team just making bad decsions on who to draft when that slot came up.
So, the Guardians are by no means terrible but, at the same time, they are not like a lot of other teams. They will have a perennially low payroll and MUST build from within. While they have done a great job of trading for prospects and developing, to some level, international free agent signees, they need to do a better job of drafting HS players and having them be 'hits' like McKenzie and not swings-and-misses as so many of the HS guys in the drafts mentioned above are. One of the reasons we are struggling with hitting now is that we have drafted hitters really badly and we are now paying the price for that. So if you want to say that the draft is a crapshoot go ahead. I don't believe it is true and I think it is an excuse for making mistakes in the draft. When I look at the Dodgers and see Bobby Miller (drafted after Carson Tucker), Gavin Stone (drafted after Mason Hickman), Ryan Pepiot (drafted after Valdes, Cairo, Hunter Gaddis), I see guys top 100 prospects in baseball who we could have had and who would look good in a Cleveland uniform right now. While I will admit that I am cherry picking examples, these are draft picks I questioned at the time. Tucker was rated 52 at draft time and drafted by us at 26. By the study I did years ago this pick had a high percentage chance of failing whereas Miller (ranked 26th, drafted 29th) was a good, safe choice. You can argue all you want about how the draft is a crapshoot but the truth is that we need to be better than almost any team in choosing our draft choices and have less misses and just as many, if not more, stud picks than any other team competing for a playoff spot. That is just the way it is when you are a low market team with high expectations.
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