My wife mentioned to me this morning that she saw a blip on the news about the baseball draft being this weekend, and she was asking me if I was going to watch it. I told her no.

She was like, "Wait a second. You basically plan a couple of days in the spring around watching the football draft, and you don't even know who most of the guys really are. And you always watch the NBA draft (where I generally know a lot more about the 1st round picks). You don't even think about the baseball draft. Why?"

I was like, it is basically two things:

1) You can't trade picks, and that is actually a really fun part of the NBA and NFL drafts. In fact, the drama around a team giving up future picks to go and "get" that quarterback or whatever is an underlying drama the whole time.

2) I don't any of the baseball players being drafted - like, none of them. And even the best prospects have pretty much nothing to do with the major leagues for years. When the Red Sox drafted Marcelo Mayer last year, it was the highest draft pick of adult lifetime as a Red Sox fan (I believe). Mayer was probably the best prospect in the draft - it is very cool that we got him. Then he went to one of the short-season Florida leagues and killed it as an 18-year-old.

Then, this year, he is a top-15 prospect in baseball, goes up to Salem (low-A), and is killing it as a 19-year-old. He looks like the 100% real deal as a SS with power, speed, discipline, defense, bat control...a potential franchise player. Sounds awesome!

And he might go to high-A next month. Then if it goes well he could be in AA by late next year. Maybe.

Then in 2024 he starts in AA (as a 21-year-old), then would go to AAA sometime that year.

And if all of that goes really well, he could be in Boston as our shortstop sometime in 2025, as a 22-year-old. Maybe.

This is an elite prospect, doing everything well. A 2021 draft pick maybe starting for us in 2025.

Meanwhile, Mac Jones gets drafted a month earlier by my Patriots, as a 22-year-old, and is the starting quarterback for New England in September 2022. By 2025 - when Mayer might be in the bigs - Jones will have been the QB of a marquee NFL franchise for four years.

That's why I don't give a ### about the MLB draft.

An article like this should choose from among players who might possibly have been considered for the top spot. This drivel is just the most valuable player from each draft class.

My wife mentioned to me this morning that she saw a blip on the news about the baseball draft being this weekend, and she was asking me if I was going to watch it. I told her no.

She was like, "Wait a second. You basically plan a couple of days in the spring around watching the football draft. Why?"

I think the condensed version would have been a more sensible question from Mrs. Balboni's Personal Trainer.

I still have to chuckle at Bill Almon. You use your precious draft pick on a...career utility infielder? Likewise almost with Tim Foli. I do wonder what people saw in these players; wasn't it obvious that Foli would never develop any power? [I mean he was a stick with the We Are Family Pirates 11 years later-hate to see a pic of him as an amateur]

The Padres would have been happy to keep Almon at shortstop, but then they came up with Ozzie Smith.

I still have to chuckle at Bill Almon. You use your precious draft pick on a...career utility infielder?

From Brown University! Imagine if someone from the Ivy League went #1 overall today. Also round 1 from that draft - Dale Murphy, Lonnie Smith, Garry Templeton, Lance Parrish, Rick Sutcliffe, yikes.

I still have to chuckle at Bill Almon. You use your precious draft pick on a...career utility infielder? L

I'm pretty sure they didn't realize that was his ceiling when they made the pick.

#1 -- points 1 and 2 are sorta related. Would trading draft picks really be interesting in baseball given a team is acquiring the #7 pick to grab a guy nobody's heard of and won't make the majors for 3-4 years? Would teams make those trades often knowing that what they're trading for is a guy with a 10% chance of being their above-average SS of the 2026 team? And even if all that would have been fun and exciting, with absent/disappearing compensation picks, etc. I don't know if we're ever again gonna see one of those drafts where Oakland or Tampa has 7 of the first 50 picks to swap from.

That said, you're maybe pessimistic about your prospect. Players jump from AA to the majors all the time these days and would do it more often without the service time rules. Maybe that has changed with the trimming of the minors but I don't think we can complain that we aren't seeing enough debuts at 20-21 these days.

Almon: Too long ago to trust my memory but I recall him as being a pretty big deal. Maybe he was just a big deal because of the #1 pick but I don't recall anybody criticizing the pick -- though there wasn't much public criticism of such things in those days, at least in baseball.

That was an odd first round -- 40 WAR or nothing (OK, not really). And what would we say today if a team burned a 1st-round pick on some skinny speedster glove-first CF with no power potential? Willie Wilson turned out pretty good (and maybe Lonnie Smith fits that characterization too).

I'm surprised how many don't actually work out. I would assume most number 1s would make the MLB and do well but I wouldn't assume they'd get less than five WAR or maybe not even make the majors. Maybe I could see a few arm injuries derailing people but there's a lot of bad first round picks there

The draft is largely a crap shoot. The outcomes at the very top are clearly superior and the higher the round, the better the chances but, at an individual level, it's not clear anybody knows how they'll turn out with maybe the occasional exception of a Griffey, Harper, etc. type.

The #1 picks are over 1100 WAR total with 92% of them making it so about an average of 21 WAR. They're in a terrible slump though ... which obviously may change as, say, Rutschman's career goes on but since Correa in 2012 it's

Appel bust, Aiken unsighed and bust, Swanson solid but unspectacular 12 WAR, Moniak bust, Royce Lewis looking busty, Mize OK 3 WAR, Rutschman so far so good, Torkelson so far very bad, Henry Davis tore up A+ for 100 PA but disaster at AA in 76 PA. Swanson may finally have reached regular AS level and is a good bet to make it to at least 20 WAR, Rutschman has been very good for the last month and of course Torkelson could start hitting tomorrow. But I'm pretty sure there are at least 4 busts there plus Mize just had TJS.

That follows a decade where 6 of 10 have made it to at least 30 WAR so far with at least 3 guys likely to add substantially to that (and maybe Strasburg). The decade before that had ARod and Mauer and 3 more really good guys and 2 more good guys; the one before that had Chipper, Griffey and only two busts.

The #2 pick is nearly 400 WAR behind #1. That's an average of about 8 WAR per pick (who's had enough time to accumulate value) which is pretty huge in baseball terms ... but still in theory just $64+ M in today's dollars (so by 50 picks, the #1 should get a bonus only about $1.3 M more than #2). The #3 pick is another 100 WAR further back ... alreay we are down to an average of 13.5 WAR per MLer.

Mainly I think we just have an unrealistic sense of how much value there is to be found anyway. There are 54 active players with 30+ career WAR, another 46 with 19-29 (that's where b-r's list ends). That of course includes several players who were not available in the draft. In an average draft year, there are probably only something like 8 guys who will make it to 20+ WAR. Fair enough that we might expect that all 8 would go in the first round or at least the first two rounds but we should expect busts and "disappointments" all over the place.

So I just grabbed the 1996 draft:

1st 3 20+, 4 10-19, 35 picks
2nd 1, 2, 30
3rd 0, 1
4th 0, 0 (best was 1.4 WAR)
5th 0, 2
6-10: 1, 3

So we're over 300 picks in with 5 "stars" and another 12 "average or better, probably mostly during their pre-FA period". If they projected perfectly, we'd run out of interesting picks about halfway through the first round ... just like the NBA.

Being consistently above-average in baseball is REALLY REALLY HARD. The only reason there are so many rounds to the draft is because baseball needs this massive development system just to get those 15-30 guys (across all of MLB not for a team) to the point where they can hold their own then maybe they take a step or two forward when they get there ... a process that takes years.

Why is it so difficult is a good question. Sure, projecting a current HS senior is tough but you'd think that the difference between a future 20-WAR college player and a future 2 WAR college player would be pretty clear. But it obviously isn't -- might be interesting to look at the college vs HS rates though. Like it or not, this does raise the "Moneyball" question of "why are we spending money on scouting when we could buy a copy of BA and a random number generator and do just as well?" It is also consistent with the idea that, with the possible exception of the Griffey types, success is a lot more about development than raw talent-spotting.

It's hard to project performance years in advance, even harder to project injuries. Try projecting established MLB players 3+ years out and see how you do. I suspect it's not *that* much better than teams do with the draft.

Tim Foli hit .562 as a high school senior. He was an elite basketball and football player too. Offered a scholarship to play QB at USC.

I saw him towards the end of his career, he was the SS for the 1982 Angels, the first team I followed. He was a solid, reliable defensive SS, but that’s the only positive I can say about him. I just assume that out of high school people thought he’d be a lotter better than what he became. Maybe they thought he’d have the career that Robin Yount did.

#11 Try one year in advance. Szym (and others) have put in a ton of work and even among uninjured established regular players the results of their projections are pretty noisy.

The simple issue is that baseball players are farther away from being ready than football players are.

In the NFL a smart coach can find a way to get immediate value from somebody with athletic gifts even if he's really raw. Pure athleticism just doesn't go as far in MLB and that's the easy part to scout.

The late 60s/mid 70s was a terrible time for the top pick.

Rick Monday, the first ever pick, had a good career. But from 1967 to 1975 Jeff Burroughs was the only 1-1 to have more than 10 career WAR. Teams did a better job after that. Looks like the bust picks, on average, happenned once every 4 years.

#11 ... First, they're much different projection tasks. I mean projecting "this 8th round pick has a 20% chance of hanging on for about 3 years, reach A=, maybe AA" might be a perfectly accurate projection but who cares? In the draft, you're projecting whether they will be in the 30% (I made that up) that make the majors and then the probability that they'll be in the 10% that make it to 10 WAR (made that up too). At the MLB level, you're essentially projecting "we expect this guy to be worth X WAR over the next Y years so we should offer him Z dollars." The minor-league projection task is closer to "after their first 900 PA or 180 innings, predict who will make the HoF" ... and certainly we all stink at that except for obvious future HoFers like Claudell Washington.

But second, of course it's easier to project the next 3 years of a MLB player. Sure, it's still a projection that has a wide margin of error attached (that's the real challenge in projection) but the outcome (for almost any player we are currently interested in) will be somewhere between "AAA quality" and "30% improvement." That might be for no other reason than "more data of higher quality" but I'm confident it's a very real difference. An equivalent minor-league projection task might be something like "will this player be in the majors within the next 3 years."

As a quick and dirty example, in 2018 there were 75 qualified batters with at least a 110 OPS+. 59 of them are still active in 2022 -- or 60 if you want to count Conforto who would be if he wasn't hurt. Most are still full-time or getting major time, a few are hanging by a thread (e.g. Piscotty). Many of the ones who haven't made the cut aren't huge surprises -- they were old or late bloomers or were pretty much always considered pretty borderline (e.g. Camargo). I think it's fair to say that, at the end of 2018, nobody would have expected Zobrist, Kemp, Markakis, Choo or Encarnacion to still be significant players in 2022 (EE probably closest).

Khris Davis
Travis Shaw (has played a bit this year)
Miguel Andujar (has played a bit this year)
Gregory Polanco (>300 PA last year)
Scooter Gennett
Jose Martinez
Conforto (injured)
Smoak
Kemp (33)
Zobrist (37)
Encarnacion (35)
Markakis (34)
Johan Camargo
Mallex Smith
Choo (35)
Asdrubal (>300 PA last year)

I'm not sure if covid made it more (the missed year for guys in the minors) or less (borderline vets skipping 2020) likely for a guy to survive. I'm not going to check in detail by my rough count was that 27 of those guys have signed long-term contracts since 2018, including guys like Schwarber, Castellanos, Baez, Story who just signed them. (Correa and Seager were both hurt in 2018 naturally.) Projecting a "good" MLer is not really any harder than saying 80% of the first 30 picks will eventually make the majors ... and just as some of those guys will make the majors only because they were a 1st round pick, some of the MLers will still be around only because they were good 4 years ago.

A better comparison to the MLB projection challenge might be to look at the projectability of top 30 prospect lists which at least have some data behind them and generally include only guys who have met/exceeded expectations so far. Those lists should be a LOT more accurate than the draft's first 30 picks.

Henry Davis tore up A+ for 100 PA but disaster at AA in 76 PA

Davis fractured his wrist in May, after just two games in AA. Recovery has been hampered by HBPs. Davis has been hit 17 times in 183 plate appearances this year. When he came back from the wrist in June he was hit in both his rehab games, then again in his second game back in AA. The Pirates have shut him down for a while to get fully recovered. He was also hit 11 times in 228 PA with college Louisville in 2021.

Davis fractured his wrist in May, after just two games in AA. Recovery has been hampered by HBPs. Davis has been hit 17 times in 183 plate appearances this year. When he came back from the wrist in June he was hit in both his rehab games, then again in his second game back in AA. The Pirates have shut him down for a while to get fully recovered. He was also hit 11 times in 228 PA with college Louisville in 2021.

Sounds like the new Tony Conigliaro. Does he crowd the plate?

I know he’s controversial, but a reminder of how good Alex Rodriguez was as a player.

You know how I talk about how cute it is when they try to make the College World Series a thing, as it were identical to The Big Dance? Well, same thing with the MLB Draft. Unlike the NFL or the NBA, ain't no kid getting drafted and stepping directly into MLB; baseball is too hard for that. (Hell, baseball is so hard even Michael Jordan couldn't do it!)

Pure athleticism just doesn't go as far in MLB and that's the easy part to scout.

Bo Jackson being the only notable counter-example; Bo was a superstar on the gridiron (and Tecmo Bowl!) and probably could've won an Olympic medal as a sprinter, but batted only .250 in the majors (albeit with a heckuva lot of pop).

You know how I talk about how cute it is when they try to make the College World Series a thing, as it were identical to The Big Dance? Well, same thing with the MLB Draft. Unlike the NFL or the NBA, ain't no kid getting drafted and stepping directly into MLB; baseball is too hard for that. (Hell, baseball is so hard even Michael Jordan couldn't do it!)

I don't know that it's baseball that is too hard for that, it's possible because of the minor league system setup that baseball just is a higher level of competition. Imagine if the NBA or NFL had a minors system akin to hockey or baseball. I get that college works for football and basketball in much the same way, but then you are limited to just four years to either prove yourself or wash out with no real future options. Meanwhile MLB and NHL are full of players who are starters at the highest level who took 8 years from high school to be good enough to play, but because of the system they created, they get a real chance to prove themselves.

Has the draft become less of a crapshoot? You look at drafts in the 80s and 90s and the first round is littered with busts, I feel like more recently that isn't quite as bad, but has anyone done a study on that?

Pure athleticism just doesn't go as far in MLB and that's the easy part to scout.

Bo Jackson being the only notable counter-example; Bo was a superstar on the gridiron (and Tecmo Bowl!) and probably could've won an Olympic medal as a sprinter, but batted only .250 in the majors (albeit with a heckuva lot of pop).

Myth! Bo had been playing baseball since he was a kid, it was his favorite sport (after track). He played sandlot league as an 11 year old and played SEC baseball for four years, that is someone that has been working at his craft. He was, in addition to that, a ridiculously athletic person. But there are dudes in the NFL who are athletic, and you can't just plunk them into pro baseball without his kind of expereince.

Baseball isn't easier or harder than other sports. It just rewards different skill sets. Jordan had incredible foot and hand speed in bursts but had a long loopy swing and wasnt a super fast runner. Pujols took some reflex test at a local university in his prime and blew out the score.

The best marathoners come from Kenya...no a specific area of Kenya near the great rift.

Some people are just born to play certain games

I think the most recent 4-5 years should all be N/A at this point. Too early to tell, especially too early to say a pitcher was the best choice.

Also, I agree with the idea that it's more interesting when doing something like this to limit it to players who might plausibly have gone in the top 10 or so. But this list doesn't appear to do that, given that they select Turner, Judge, Burnes, and others. So....

2011 (Pirates): Gerrit Cole (33.5)
Should’ve picked: Cole
This class was stacked, but it’s hard to argue with Cole, even though he didn’t reach his peak until leaving Pittsburgh.

Maybe the fifth-rounder who's already put up 50+ WAR and won 2 rings?

By WAR Trevor Bauer should have gone 4th in 2011. Or should he?

You know how I talk about how cute it is when they try to make the College World Series a thing, as it were identical to The Big Dance? Well, same thing with the MLB Draft.

Maybe true. However, MLB killed an obvious tie in between the two when they moved the draft to July.

I can remember watching the CWS years ago, specifically focused on Miami and Yonder Alonso, who had just been drafted by the Reds. Hell, I can remember specific at-bats by Alonso in the CWS. Must have been 12 years ago, at least. And he ended up doing nothing for the Reds (I think he was trade fodder for Mat Latos?)

A year or two ago, the Reds took some shortstop from UCLA. I don’t remember his name, primarily because once the draft ended, I had no immediate reinforcement opportunity. The CWS was the perfect forum to watch your new favorite prospects. Killed, in yet another dumb decision by MLB

Baseball isn't easier or harder than other sports.

Ain't nothing in this world that's harder than hitting a baseball; as the saying goes, it's a round bat and a round ball, and the idea is to hit it square.

As I like to say to my young niblings: "Do you know what they do to the baseball player who fails twice as often as he succeeds...?! They put him in the Hall of Fame!"

Bo didn't come close to making the US Olympc team, much less win a medal.

An article like this should choose from among players who might possibly have been considered for the top spot. This drivel is just the most valuable player from each draft class.

Agreed. Baseball America had Aaron Judge ranked as the 30th best prospect coming into the draft. Tough to make the case that a GM picking in the top 10 should make that sort of reach. I prefer to use a 10-pick range. Using that, here are the top 10 picks from 2013 and who may have been the best pick at each spot (actual pick in parenthesis):

1. Kris Bryant (Mark Appel #1)
2. Kris Bryant (Bryant went #2).
3. Jon Gray (either Gray who did go #3 or #9 pick Austin Meadows).
4-6. Austin Meadows (#4 Kohl Stewart, # 5. Clint Frazier, #6. Colin Moran).
7. Either Meadows or J.P. Crawford, who went # 16. (#7. Trey Bell)
8-10. Tim Anderson, who was selected with the 17th overall pick. (#8. Hunter Dozier, # 9. Austin Meadows, 10. Phil Bickford.)

Aaron Judge went at #32 and is clearly the best player chosen between #23 and #32…

But second, of course it's easier to project the next 3 years of a MLB player. Sure, it's still a projection that has a wide margin of error attached (that's the real challenge in projection) but the outcome (for almost any player we are currently interested in) will be somewhere between "AAA quality" and "30% improvement." That might be for no other reason than "more data of higher quality" but I'm confident it's a very real difference. An equivalent minor-league projection task might be something like "will this player be in the majors within the next 3 years."


Right, it’s easier to project MLB players but we still aren’t very good at it (or better phrased, we are good at it but the exercise has natural limitations). The equivalent to projecting which drafted players will be successful MLers (especially while they’re under team control) is akin to projecting which MLB players now will still be good 3-8 years from now. But you’re doing it with limited sample sizes of statistics compiled against widely varying levels of competition. So my point is that we shouldn’t be surprised that teams get the draft “wrong” so often. It’s an inherently challenging exercise.

As a quick and dirty example, in 2018 there were 75 qualified batters with at least a 110 OPS+.

Ok, now do the pitchers :-)