2024 Draft Strategy - Desperate Times Require Desperate Measures

 Everyone who reads this blog knows how much I hated the last two drafts and most of the trades we have made since the Clevinger trade.  I think our farm system is in trouble in terms of developing Josh Naylor/Bo Naylor/Gavin Williams/Tanner Bibee-like prospects  We are looking at, mostly, a bunch of Will Brennan/Eli Morgan type prospects.  Maybe a few will develop in the future to be more than that but, from all the bad trades and bad draft choices, we are more thin than most fans think we are in terms of reinforcements from the minors.

We need an influx of prospects to offset bad prospect trades and bad drafting and in light of our quantity-over-quality approach to international amateur FA signings.

So how do we do that?

The Amateur Draft: The Undiscovered Country

The answer, I think, lies in the annual amateur draft.   The process to re-stock the farm system is simple.  You just draft and sign every possible great prospect no matter the cost!  Sounds simple, right? But even if you get ownership to OK this, baseball rules have penalties for taking this approach, the worst of which appears to be loss of your next 2 first round picks and a penalty of 100% of the amount you over your MLB-imposed draft budget.  These penalties, and lesser ones for less flagrant draft budget overages, have stopped every team so far from going over 4.99% over their assigned bonus pool.

But does it have to?   Well, no team wants to throw millions of dollars away in penalties.   The approach I mentioned above could end up with a draft that costs us $40 million with another $40 million in penalties.  That almost equals the total ML salary for the Guardians for 2023.  But let's assume your ownership will make this investment, as a one-time thing, for one year knowing that the next year and the year after that they wouldn't have first round picks and so would save $8 million on those two drafts.

But First Round Picks Are So Valuable...

Remember, the approach I am talking about is drafting and signing top prospects in every round of the draft, no matter what your total budget spend would end up being. No more drafting 2nd and first tier college and HS players hoping to catch lightning in a bottle after round 5.  

A reasonable question one might ask is: wouldn't this approach hurt your future not to have those two first round picks?  To figure this out all we have to do is look at how our roster is currently constructed.

• Our current 40 man roster has 4 1st round picks on it: Bo and Josh Naylor, Gavin Williams and Cal Quantrill (McKenzie was a competitive balance pick).   Two of these players were picked up in trades  (Josh Naylor, Cal Quantrill) so we really only are talking about our 40 man roster having two of our frst round picks, drafted THREE years apart. 
• Our current top 30 prospects have an additional 4 1st round picks (Daniel Espino, Chase DeLauter, Ralphy Velazquez, Khalil Watson,) on it. With Watson obtrained in a trade, we only have 3 prospects who were our first round picks.

In other words, only about 8% of our ML players and our current top prospects were our 1st round picks.  That leaves over 90%, including Bibee, Allen, Kwan, Cantillo, Freeman and all the international guys.

Plus, of the 8 guys on these two lists who are 1st round picks, only 2 of them, theoretically, would be lost if we took the approach above and the impact of those losses would depend totally on WHERE you drafted in the first round.  

The proof is in the pudding

So, now I have your interest.  But is it even possible in one draft to draft AND SIGN enough quality prospects to make this approach viable?  So I looked  at the 2023 draft to see what it would take.  There is some conjecture in this mock draft as a number of guys weren't even drafted and some who were drafted late as 'flyers' weren't even signed.  Here are my criteria for this list:

• Player has to be drafted by me before they were drafted by another team
• HS players have to be 18 years old or younger at draft time (the new CBA says that players drafted when they are 19 or older have one year less of control before they become minor league free agents)
• Player must not have told MLB before the draft that they would not sign and were going to/back to college.   Players who made that commitment during or after the draft were still considered draftable as a large bonus could likely have persuaded them to sign, even when drafted in later rounds, especially if Cleveland had had conversations with them before the draft that they might be drafted late but would still be considered for a sizeable bonus even with a late slot..

So, without further adieu, would have been my 2023 draft IF I wasn't worried about any penalties.  Bonuses for players not drafted or drafted but not signed are my estimates.  Those players are indicated in bold.

1 - Hurston Waldrep - college RHP - $3.00 million, MLB Pipeline rank: 19

2. Alex Clemmey - HS LHP - $2.3 million, rank: 50

2c. Joe Whitman - College RHP - $802,000, rank: 37

3. Cole Schoenwetter - HS RHP - $1.3 million, rank 43

4. Cooper Pratt - HS SS - $1.35 million, rank: 45

5. Jace Bohrofen - college OF - $302,000, rank: 66

6. George Volkow - HS OF, 1.00 million, rank: 71

7. Alex Mooney - college SS -  $1.00 million, rank: 114

8. Jared Dickey - college OF - $572,000, rank: 115

9. Ross Dunn - college RHP - $175,000, rank: 140

10. Jack Payton - college C - $175,000, rank: 148

11. Tanner Witt - college RHP - $2 million, rank: 70

12. Liam Peterson - HS RHP - $1.5 million, rank: 85

13. Jacob Bresnahan - HS RHP - $375,000, NOT RANKED

14. Joey Volchko - HS RHP - $2.5 million, rank: 80

15. Ethan McElvain - HS LHP, $2 million, rank: 106

16. Cameron Johnson - HS RHP, $4 million, rank: 42

17. Parker Dettmers - HS RHP, $1.8 million, rank: 13

18. Luke McNellie, HS RHP, $2 million, rank: 106

19. Dylan Cupp, HS SS, $1.8 million, rank: 111

20. Will Libert, HS LHP, $1.75 million, rank: 134

This brings the cost of this mock draft to $30.351 million.  Using the rankings from MLB Pipeline and the draft order in 2023, this draft has provided us with the following players (what the Guardians actually got in this draft is in parentheses);

1- first round quality (Guardians got 0 in the 2023 draft)

1 - CB-A quality (1 in actual 2023 draft)

7 - second round and CB-B quality (1)

3 - 3rd round quality (0)

7 - 4th round quality (2)

2 - 5th round quality (2)

1 - Not ranked by MLB Pipeline

The question becomes:  is this enough quality talent to incur the penalties that would come with this draft:

• loss of first round draft picks for the next 2 years
• A $21,614,300 penalty, making the overall spend on this draft $51,965,300.

The big qualification here is that everyone I drafted would have to sign for the dollar figures indicated above.  I feel pretty good about that as I was very aggressive in my bonus offers to make sure guys would actually sign.

SUMMARY

Let's end this exercise by looking at stats and the pros and cons of the strategy:

Stats

• We have obtained 20 players with 1st to 5th round ability in this draft
• In the actual draft Cleveland obtained 6 players ranked to go in the first 5 rounds)
• 8 college players (4 pitchers)
• 13 HS players (10 pitchers)
• cost is $51,965,300 including penalties (cost of the Guardians actual draft w/penaltes was $9,504,000)

Pros and Cons

• CON: The cost, with penalties, was almost 6 times what a normal draft would have cost (only 4X the cost without penalties)
• PRO: We got the top 5 round talent in this draft that we obtain in FOUR normal drafts.  
• PRO: We obtained all that talent in one year, immediately improving the strength of our farm system that it would likely take us 3-4 drafts to make happen.
• CON: Those 13 HS players, including the 10 pitchers, will all hit Rule 5 eligibility and 6-year minor league free agent eligibility at the same time. 
• PRO: The 8 college players, less than we normally take, lessens the impact of the new CBA rule about college guys getting minor league free agency after their first 5 full seasons.   The quality of these guys means that we will likely have a read on whether we need to roster them well before they are required to be rostered due to the Rule 5 or 6-year MiLB free agency rule.
• PROL We still have the CB pick and normal 2-20 round draft picks in each of the next 2 drafts (staying within draft budget guidelines) so we can still obtain talent.
• PRO: We save probably $7 million in the next two drafts by not having first round picks, lessening the cost of this draft.
• CON: This strategy will not allow us to get more quality college players into the system as most of those players are almost always gone before the end of round 10.  Guys like Zach Plesac and Adam Plutko are sometime available but they are more complementary players rather than all-stars.  So, without impact college players available in later rounds, any quick influx of players to the ML team is unlikely through this type of draft strategy.
• PRO: This strategy WILL allow you to get more HS players but, obviously, the development of HS players is a little more dicey. and the development timeline will be longer.  This mans that you are positively impacting the quality and depth of your farm system but, without effective trading of prospects for veterans, you will not be able to, in the short term, impact the quality of your ML team with this strategy.

So, there you have it.  I will leave it to the readers of this blog as to whether you think this is a reasonable approach.  

CONCLUSION

Since it's my idea, I think it is a good one. I like it because our farm system is starting to get weak and this immediately injects talent into it at a hugely faster rate than if we had to obtain it in 3-4 years of drafting.  In addition, we still get lower round talent in those later 2-3 drafts.  However, the drawbacks to this approach is that it costs a LOT of money and, by my analysis at least, shows that it can't be a quick fix to get talent to the majors because, using my approach, you are leveraging the available talent that isn't selected early in a draft (or drafted at all) and that talent, almost invariably, is HS talent who will take longer to develop and cost much more money than just picking some college-trained organizational guys, a few of whom may develop into lower impact ML players in the future.