Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1070: What Winning the Draft Looks Like

Episode Date: June 12, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Aaron Judge’s latest home runs, Terrance Gore’s first home run, the Angels without Mike Trout, and a Mets precedent for the odd Neifi Perez appearance discussed on the previous episode, then talk to listener Ryan Nelson about his research into which teams have had the most and least […]

You heard the words of Aaron. He spoke the truth in these things, both great and small. Hello and welcome to episode 1070 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. My name is Ben Lindberg. I'm a writer for The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. It's draft day, which is getting in the way of what I really want to do, which is just watch all the home runs Aaron Judge hit this weekend and giggle for half an hour or so and then call it a day. Those are some long home runs there was a debate in the ringer slack about how much we should penalize Aaron Judge for doing all this

damage against the Orioles and bad Orioles pitching because if you look at some of these home runs I mean he's hit what is it eight homers against the Orioles so far this year it's like one of the all-time greatest performances by a single player against a single team i think already and if you look at like the 495 foot one that he hit on sunday that was like the meatballiest meatball you've ever seen and wellington castillo the catcher was like cringing as judge was swinging like before he even made contact, he was like looking away like, I don't want to see this. And it was Logan Verrett and not great pitchers. I think if you looked at BP's quality of opponents metric,

Judge was like 34th easiest pitchers faced before that day, before Sunday. So it's not like he stands out as an extreme in that way. And he's been such an amazing hitter anyway, that you could penalize him a little bit for facing easier pitchers and it wouldn't bump him down all that much. So it was mostly that we have Orioles fans and Yankees fans in the slack and they were going back and forth at each other. But basically Aaron Judge is amazing and I hope he keeps hitting gigantic home runs that are the hardest ever and the farthest ever all season yeah so I had Darren Judge written down to talk about because why

wouldn't he be he uh for anyone who wasn't paying attention over the weekend he hit the I know the stat cast era is short so saying the stack s era doesn't really mean very much but Aaron Judge does now as of this weekend have the hardest ever home run of the StatCast era at something like 121 miles per hour. And he is now tied for the second longest home run of the StatCast era. The first one, I believe, happened in Coors Field. I don't know if that's true, but it's probably true because it's Coors Field. So that doesn't really count. I think I read it's the longest according to HitTracker, ESPN's non-StatCast based method.

according to HitTracker, ESPN's non-stat cast based method. They said it was the longest ever, I think, going back to 2009, according to that method. Longest ever for nine years. But still, it counts. It's better than two and a half. So yeah, I get, I don't know, if you were a Yankees fan or Orioles fan, the conversation would come down to Yankees fan, Aaron Judge is great. Orioles fan, self-deprecating. And also you don't want to give credit to a rival hey our pitching is bad so he is your player is not very good it doesn't matter this isn't aaron judge teeing off against the orioles and hitting like a bunch of home runs ago 410 feet no this is aaron judge hitting the fastest home run and then basically the longest home run and oh by the way those were different home runs and i know like one of the i don't know dangers dangers is too strong but

because of what we do and because of how stack cast info feels like it's everywhere like it's june 11th as we record this and aaron judge's strength is already like old hat and he's a rookie like it already kind of doesn't matter which i get because we already know we've already known he's capable of of these home runs like nobody cares about aroldis chapman's second 105 mile per hour fastball because we already know he could do it but like just get it through your head what harry judge is doing all of those comparisons to jean carlos santon it's yeah it's true he is that strong and based on now two and a half months of baseball,

he is also that good or, you know, based on what he's done, even better. I know there's going to be adjustments and stuff. I'm going to be writing about that this week. But the fact of the matter is that this is special. I don't know. We don't know enough to say whether or not this is almost unprecedented. But like Aaron Judge is four standard deviations above the freaking mean baseball player he's really amazing and i know that maybe people make too much about a long home run or a ball that reaches the upper deck whatever because the home runs are all created the same right but like this is someone who's doing something that only maybe one or two or three other players in baseball can do and he's doing it with a certain amount of regularity which is just incredible aaron judge is not just some yankee hype machine out of control he is amazing yeah not to give away

your conclusions but have there been adjustments of some sort because last time we talked about it you uh you said there hadn't right that you'd had looked and hadn't really found anything so we had some communication some time ago that was not on the podcast where you were asking me what i was working about or something you asked me what i was writing about some like wednesday or thursday morning and i responded to you saying oh i don't know yet and you had like a panic attack on my behalf because i didn't have a plan so the only reason i even know i'm writing about erin judge this week is because i i give one article a week to espn and so we have to pre- those topics. So I've told them, here's what I'm going to do. But I have not.

I have looked at nothing. So I have no idea what that article is going to say. Okay. So you can't give away anything if you wanted to. All right. Here's all I know. His numbers haven't gotten worse, which is just absurd. That's very true.

Lost over the weekend. Well, several baseballs hit by Aaron Judge. But Aaron Judge hit multiple home runs terence gore hit one i don't know if you heard about this you i did uh not the major leagues of course that would be that would be the end of the major leagues but terence gore in triple a hit his first ever professional home run it was an outside of the park home run for anyone who doesn't remember well i'll jog your memory terence gore doesn't jog now you remember terence gore he is the uh the royals bench speedster he what rose a certain

level of prominence was it 2014 or 2015 that he was on the bench 14 was when he first came up yeah yeah something like that but anyway he's you know uh when when he came up was it was it herb washington was he the ace player way back in the that it was the uh the sprinter basically one of those no hit really good runners like billy hamilton level running and then worse than billy hamilton level hitting in any case terence gore in plate appearance number 1948 hit a home run to left field he pulled the ball it was against well who cares who it was against somebody who probably wishes it didn't happen but i saw on twitter the ball was recorded at 96 miles per hour off the bat so i don't know if that's hit fx or track man in triple a but you know that's like fine it's not anything extraordinary you probably saw batted balls hit at least that hard

in sonoma so terence gore by no means, suddenly developing Aaron Judge power, but the ball got out. If you watch the video clip, it got out by a healthy margin. According to the box score, the wind was blowing out at 13 miles per hour in the direction that the baseball went. So there's that. But the announcer, after Gore hit the home run, said, quote, he almost hit one yesterday and he does today.

In fact, the day before Terrence Gore came very close to hitting a home run. He had to settle for a triple, but his entire dugout was up on its feet cheering for the ball to get out. So this was clearly a thing. It's a little more satisfying than when Ben Revere hit his first home run because Revere had homered in the minors before. Gore had not. I don't know what this means for us now, but just wanted to say that Terrence Gore did go deep. Yeah. If Terrence Gore goes Zach Cozart or whatever on us, I'm just giving up. Yeah, that's it. I'm retiring. Yeah. He's slugging 262 after the home run. So I don't think we're really in any danger of that, but still congrats to Gore. That is cool. I don't know that I would have bet on him

ever doing it so good to see yeah what would you I mean it I don't know it doesn't mean anything after the fact but if if you had to guess what the chances were that Terrence Gore's first professional home run would be outside the park what would you have said because I would have said like 70 inside the the park, some kind of weird misplay or scoring decision or something like that. I would have considered that more likely than over the fence. I don't know what odds I would have given it. Yeah, man. Yeah. would have given it yeah man yeah looking at the career batting average between levels of 240 slugging percentage 272 which means isolated power of 0.032 which is pitcher level and not like good

pitcher level like terence gore like you said does not hit extra base hits because he doesn't hit the ball hard at all which makes it kind of all the more incredible that he actually hit one that didn't just clear an outfielder's head it cleared a lot of heads that's good for a terran score who officially measures in at 57 165 which means he's probably 36 and 30 pounds so congratulations to the world's fastest small baby but career 92 stolen base success rate across all levels with 282 steals that's pretty awesome and that's why Terrence Gore is a baseball player very good moving on I have two more small bits of banter one just more of a fun fact than banter but following their game against the Astros today I just wanted to let you know how the Angels have done since Mike Trout went down with an injury the Angels at the time

up through the game in which Mike Trout got hurt they were 26 and 27 and they were averaging 4.0 runs scored per game. Since Mike Trout went down, they are 7 and 6, averaging 5.2 runs per game. They just clobbered the Astros 12 to 6 on Sunday. Nothing matters. I have absolutely no idea what to do with this. The Angels better since Mike Trout got injured. Yeah, that's just one of those, I don't know, you can't predict baseball Susan sort of stats. But yeah, a lot of people were talking about the Angels without Trout and how like the entire

team was like sub replacement level or something if you don't count Trout or at least the position players were. And I remember you got a chat question about whether the Angels without Trout were the worst team in baseball. And to your credit, I remember you got a chat question about whether the Angels without Trout were the worst team in baseball. And to your credit, I believe you said no, that teams like the Padres and the Phillies were still worse than the Angels without Trout. And thus far, that has been borne out. So yeah, it's just weirdness. Bad teams are good for that stretch of time, but it would be curious if that kept up for much longer and to close it out we were we both received a tweet from espn's mark simon who uh i don't know if you had

heard about the uh tommy reynolds game before no are you familiar great okay so i hadn't either well i don't need to explain why so we had talked in the previous podcast about a game in which neffy perez made an emergency catching appearance and two pitches later his team lost on a wild pitch that neffy perez couldn't catch and and the rockies went down so mark simon tweeted at us to look up tommy reynolds tommy reynolds and the 1967 mets he said that tommy reynolds was the original neffy perez that's a sentence that i guess has now been recorded and will be saved for eternity. But I would just like to, for anyone who doesn't know this, and it seems like this is a game that is well known within New York Mets lore, but most of us probably not old timey Mets fans. So let's

just go over it. We are looking at a game between the Mets and the Dodgers on July 27th, 1967. I'm given to understand in this game, the Mets were already shorthanded. I don't know what the reasons were, but they were playing with only 21 players dressed. So already a problem. The Mets were well under 500. The Dodgers also well under 500. Neither team going anywhere.

But in any case, so John Sullivan was the starting catcher for the Mets. And in the top of the seventh inning, John Sullivan came up in a close game and he hit an RBI single and then the Mets manager at the time was Wes Westrom that's a new name to me he was he was followed by one named Salty Parker big year to be a Mets fan in any case Wes Westrom I guess in the seventh inning after Sullivan's RBI single decided that what he wanted to do was pinch run for John Sullivan which is not uncommon uh John Sullivan

being a catcher of course you want to pinch run for your catcher in a one run game what was weird was that he pinch ran for starting catcher John Sullivan with backup catcher Gary Grote so one sign that the Mets were short-staffed but in any case groat did not come around to score in the top of the seventh inning greg goosen fun names in the 60s greg goosen struck out looking against don drysdale that's probably not a surprise i've never heard of greg goosen i've definitely heard of don drysdale i could tell you how that was going to work out so goosen struck out with runners on the corners to at top of the seventh inning over Jerry Grote stranded at first so we go to the bottom of the seventh and I guess it was easy because Grote pinch ran for John Sullivan Grote just slid right

in to be the catcher and there's a walk there is a bunt ground out there is a single ground out a walk pop fly etc Dodgers did not score in the bottom of the seventh. However, something, something must have ticked off one Jerry Grote, because while Grote was behind the plate and nothing horrible was happening in front of him, when the seventh inning ended, Grote was ejected for arguing with the umpire about balls and strikes. And the strike zone, Grote either had forgotten that he was the team's only remaining catcher or didn't care because the Mets were so bad and so in came Tommy Reynolds Tommy Reynolds had to hit for Grote in the top of the eighth he was intentionally walked which is weird but Reynolds at this point when the Reynolds came

in to pinch hit for Grote the Mets had taken a five to three lead and this was in the eighth so Reynolds at least could think well we have a lead I will only have to catch the eighth and the ninth and hopefully that will be it well the Dodgers took the lead in the bottom of the eighth and then the Mets tied it up in the top of the ninth and so the game went on to extra innings and Tommy Reynolds could continue to catch Tommy Reynolds only ever professional uh appearance playing catcher he was just a utility player who happened to be available on the bench. Long story short, I don't want to bore you with all the details, but in the bottom of the 11th, the Mets wound up losing to the Dodgers in what I believe is the Mets' only ever walk-off loss on a

passed ball that got by Tommy Reynolds, thrown by Jack Fisher, and the Dodgers won the game 7-6. I don't know if Tommy Reynolds did anything wrong. I didn't try to look up video. I doubt that there is publicly available video. It feels like the real villain here is either Jerry Grote or Wes Westrom, either one of them. But Nefi Perez, not the first to end up in that situation and maybe the last, but almost certainly not the last. Yeah, it's crazy games like that, that make managers carry three catchers on the roster at the same time, which seems inefficient, but they never want to end up with Nafee Perez catching or a crazy outcome like that. So risk aversion. That's weird. Thanks, Mark Simon. Probably should not have pinch run for

John Sullivan. No, how much faster could he have been? I wonder, right? Unless there was an injury or something like it can't have been that huge a difference. John Sullivan, career 0 for 2, stealing bases. However, Jerry Grote, career 15 for 38, stealing bases. Wow. Okay. So which one do you actually want running? Probably the 0 for 2, right?

Yeah, right. Just whatever. They were terrible. Who cares? All right. So we've They were terrible. Who cares? Alright, so we've got a guest. Let's bring him on now. Okay, so the draft is always I think a difficult thing for us to talk about because we are ostensibly baseball analysts,

but our knowledge and analysis really only extends to professional players. So when we get around to draft day, we feel like we should talk about the draft, but we don't actually know anything about the players being drafted or how the teams are drafting them really so if you want the sort of podcast that is about specific players and who might go to which team and which teams have the most picks and that sort of thing i've got you covered there also i talked to eric long and hagan fangraphs prospect analysts on the bringer podcast and that's up now too but we're gonna do a slightly different sort of draft talk now we got an email from a listener named ryan nelson last week and he linked us to some work that he did back in february when everyone was super interested in the draft

but we are bringing him on now to tell us about his work hi ryan hey guys how you doing good tell us a little bit about yourself what do you do do? Well, I just graduated college, actually. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I'm going to do. But for now, as far as baseball goes, I actually am a part-time writer for a website called Inside Injuries. They analyze sports injuries, not just baseball, but all sports, and kind of give not only the updates that you see everywhere, but also some deeper link to it for everyone can go and see all the details and the numbers and the charts and everything. But just a broad general question, what are some of the difficulties when it comes to evaluating the draft? Because it's a tough thing to do. You can't just do it anecdotally and say this was a good pick and that was a bad pick. You have to make all sorts of adjustments and look at it from different angles.

So what are some of the complications? Yeah, certainly. Some of the problems you have with analyzing the draft you can control for, these things can be like where you pick. Obviously, an earlier pick you would imagine would end up being a better player. And then some are a little harder to adjust for, like, you know, if a player turns out great, how much of that was making a good draft pick, how much of that was developing the player. And that you can, in theory, adjust for, but it gets a lot harder, a lot quicker. And those are two of the bigger problems you see when you're trying to figure out if a team's actually good at drafting. So we should probably dive into the bulk of the analysis that you did. You sent this email in the first place because last week I tried to scrabble together an article about the draft to see which teams had drafted the best based on nothing but results. You sent in an email providing a link to

an article you wrote about the same topic, except it's much, much better, which I appreciate. And because now this shifts the burden of the pressure to you. So we've both gone over the article. It's very wonderful. We're pleased to have you with us in the first place. So if you could, I guess, I don't know, it's big, but how would you describe what would be your what's the word abstract for the article that you put together? Sure. I would say that the whole idea of the article is to analyze which teams are the best at drafting.

So to do that, I used a very simple statistic, wins above replacement, something that everyone knows and is relatively easy to understand. And instead of just saying who picked the players that ended up getting the most wins above replacement, I tried to adjust as best I could for those factors that we talked about earlier. The biggest one being where they were picked. So when you're adjusting for that, the easiest way I found is actually fit a formula to it, just like you would do in a basic statistics class that would kind of help us estimate based on where a player's pick, how good in theory they should be. So obviously the first overall pick should be better than the 100th overall pick. And then we can actually fit a formula to that to make a pretty good estimate of X player and Y pick,

what should they end up being. So once I did that, I basically added up any positive, above-value players, players that did better than you would think, and then subtracted players that did worse than you would think, and then subtracted players that did worse than you would expect, and then just summarized those by teams. So what that allows us to do is, spoiler here if you haven't read it yet, the Cardinals ended up being the best drafting team by this method. They had an estimated about 175 wins above what you would expect based on the picks that they had. We also divided this by parts of the draft, analyzing early draft picks, mid-draft picks,

and late-draft picks. And we found that certain teams were actually better at picking in certain parts of the draft, and some teams were very, very bad at picking in certain parts of the draft as well. And then added that together with a quick estimation of percent of draft picks that actually reached the majors, which isn't a very high number for most teams. And we've kind of got a very basic ranking for who drafts the best. There is a reason that the Cardinals finished in the number one position. You also broke this down

on the player level in addition to the team level. And so you were looking at the draft picks made between 1998 and 2012, which is an appropriate 15 year period. No reason to look at the more recent drafts. I think we can all agree. But if you wouldn't mind just letting the audience know, why is it that the Cardinals, at least predominantly, come out in the number one spot? Which player would be most responsible? Well, it is a guy that most people have heard of. Picked with the 402nd overall pick in his year was Albert Pujols. He ended up not only being the best draft pick in the whole range of years that I've looked at, but was just the best player drafted in all of those years by wins above replacement.

And defined that guy in the 13th round that really helped with the Cardinals on top. But in defense of the Cardinals, even if you take Albert Pujols, they are an above average drafting team by the study. So it wasn't all Albert, but he certainly helped them get to the first spot. And a lot of that in their case is late round picks, which is probably not surprising when you start thinking about not just Pujols, but Carpenter and Adams and all those guys who were maybe analytics influenced finds, but guyspenter and Adams and all those guys who were maybe analytics-influenced finds, but guys who weren't necessarily top picks.

Yeah, absolutely. They really came out ahead, not just with Albert Pujols, but with a few other smart picks there in the last 35 rounds of the draft to really come out on top in that part. Yeah. And you showed the average expected war for each pick and round. And so the overall pick obviously has the highest expected war. It's like 18.5. And then the number two pick is all the way down to 11.3. So I guess that's the biggest gap in expected outcome between any one pick and the next pick.

But we're still only talking about seven wins or so, and that's over the course of a career, right? So a team might not even get the full value of that pick if the player is just under control for six seasons or whatever it is. So it's a big difference. You definitely want the first pick if you're kind of in a fight with another team for worst record in baseball, so you can get the best pick, but it's not nearly as important, it seems like, as it would be in other sports. Yeah, absolutely. Really, it is a

lottery the whole way down. You definitely see the first, you know, 30 picks or so generally fare better than the rest of the draft, but after that, it levels off very fast. And like I said, even from the first to the third or the fourth pick starts leveling off very quickly. And so that's why generally you see teams that have the best players are also the best drafters because there's really not that much difference between the fifth and the tenth pick when it's all said and done. So one of your analysis offshoots was looking at this by wins above replacement, but you also looked at this just in terms of the percent of a team's draft picks to make it all the way to the major leagues, which is another useful barometer of how a draft pick performs.

And so if you could quickly just summarize, I guess, your happiest and the least happy findings from that portion of the analysis. Yeah, I think my least happy was who ended up coming out in first place. By the wins above replacement rankings that I had, the Padres were 29th in all of baseball, mostly from the fact that they couldn't make a first round pick to save their life for about a decade there. But they actually came out first in the rankings for percent of draft picks. I think it makes sense in some ways that a bad team would have more rookies coming up and the Padres have been one of the epitomes of bad teams for

this time frame. So in that sense, it makes sense. But I didn't want to weight that too heavily because I don't want people thinking that the Padres are a very good drafting team because they've proven that they're not the best. Yeah, I think they're leading the majors in percent of rule five picks to make the majors too, probably. So the overall percentage of draft picks that reach the majors, it looks like, is just a little bit above 10% league-wide? Yeah, about 10.3%. Most teams are sitting right there within a percent or so of that. And with a couple teams jutting out way in front, the Padres are at 14.3%. The Mariners are bringing up the rear at 8.1%. But it's not that big of a difference even from first to last. We're only talking about a few percentage points. Obviously, most draft picks never even come close

to the majors. I realize I don't want this to be some sort of like Kentucky Fried Chicken secret spice mix question, but you do have an area toward the bottom of your article that refers to a super secret ranking algorithm that if you could explain in your own words, what did you perform, or at least what's the skeleton of what you performed to arrive at your final rankings there, which still have the Cardinals come out easily in first place as the best drafting team over these 15 years, and then the Orioles, followed by the Mariners, bring up the rear. What is your best summary of the super secret ranking algorithm? Well, the biggest reason I didn't really go into too much depth there is that it wasn't interesting. It's not complicated. I basically just took the wins above replacement

difference that they had between expected and the percentage. And I think I just plugged it in to a stat program and made a straight linear ranking. It basically weighted the war about probably about 80% of it overall. And the percent of draft picks to make the majors was closer to about 20%. So definitely weighted more towards the wins above replacement, but it really wasn't that much of a super secret. It was more of a name made in jest. So you were able to look at some of the best picks of all time or of this period that you looked at. You mentioned Pujols. Who else is close to the top of the list for best picks based on where they were picked and what they produced?

And then I've got to ask about the bottom picks, too. Yeah, certainly. So the top five picks actually made me really happy. We had three picks that were very late picks and two that were a little bit earlier that just turned out to be great players, so therefore good picks. Albert Pujols, as we already said, is running up first place by a very large margin. Two other later picks that did really well were Mark Burley, who was actually drafted in the 38th round. Barely even got drafted at all. And Ian Kinzler was fifth in the 17th round, a guy who could

potentially even be a Hall of Famer someday. But then we have two later first round picks, Chase Utley, who was picked 15th overall, and CeCe Sabathia was picked 20th overall. We're in second and fourth place respectively there. The reason they were good picks is they just ended up being really good players. So anytime you get a good player, it's going to end up looking like a pretty good pick. And then the worst guys? Yeah, the worst guys, as you might not be surprised, were some names I'd never even really heard of because they probably didn't make the majors. The very worst pick overall by this study was Brian Bullington, who was drafted first overall by the Pirates in 2002. He ended up just pitching 81 innings in his career. Had a career 584 ERA. And I believe he is now pitching in either Korea or Japan. Hasn't been

in the bigs in many years. Has a career wins of web replacement of negative 0.2. So not exactly what you want from your first overall pick. No, right. And that's the, let's see, who were the ones that the Pirates should be tearing their hair out in that draft round that they could have had instead, just because it's fun to play the hindsight game, even though we don't know any of this stuff at the time. I guess the sixth overall pick was Zach Granke. You've got Prince Fielder in there. You've got Scott Casimir in there, Nick Swisher. You've got Cole Hamels with the 17th pick in that draft, Matt Cain, lots of very good players picked in that first round, Melvin Upton with the second overall pick. So yeah, you typically only hear about Brian Bullington these days when you are hearing about

how bad a draft pick he was, which is unfortunate because he was a major league player. Not a lot of guys can say, but yeah, not great. In defense of some of these players, a lot of these players just haven't had a ton of time to make their impact. We went all the way through 2012. So some of these draft picks are just starting to reach the majors. I know Carlos Correa is one that actually right now has a negative differential simply because he hasn't been around that long. All signs are pointing to him being a great player, but right now he's actually not very good by this measure. Another guy would be Tim Beckham, drafted first overall by the Rays back in 08, I believe.

He's got a very large negative differential right now simply because he hasn't played that much either, but he's actually getting a lot better. I think he has more wins about replacement this year in his previous career. But we do definitely have some guys who just simply never made it at all. Some names, Dewan Brazelton, Greg Reynolds, Adam Johnson were the Rays, Rockies, and Twins picks, all in the top five picks who had negative wins above replacement in their career. A lot of guys that you might have heard of that never made it or you never heard of at all. A name that pops out to me is Luke Hockiver for the Royals. First overall pick. Only has three wins above replacement to date and doesn't look like he'll get too many

more above that. Just as a fun fact to go along with this conversation today, as we record this, the Twins are playing a game against the Giants, and the Giants' starter in the game is first-round draft pick Matt Cain. And he went opposite one Nick Turley, who was just promoted by the Twins. And Nick Turley was a 50th-round draft pick by the New York Yankees in 2008. So that's a fun thing to reflect on. I believe Turley actually lasted longer in the game than Kane did. In any case, you do spend a little bit of time in your article and research talking about your interpretation of the element of luck in the draft results. And I think everyone would be pretty well aware of the fact that luck plays a factor. But now that you're complete with the article and the research, how would you describe your feeling

as to how much of what you found would be luck versus skill versus, I don't know if you were able to think about player development at all, but how much, I guess, do you think that what you found reflects truth in terms of organizational success and not just rolls of the dice? I would say at the end of the day, I think it is more luck than probably anything else. Maybe part of that luck is actually the development that we talked about, but that would be very hard to measure. So for our intents and purposes, it might as well be luck. But you look at the Cardinals, for example, they had a total wins above replacement differential of 150 something, I believe. And 100 of that was Albert Pujols. That's one pick. If he goes somewhere else, then whoever that team was

is now the best at drafting according to this. And sometimes you do see some trends that make you think that maybe there's something going on here. Like for example, in the early round picks, the Braves actually came out in first. They had in just a 10-year period, five different picks that went on to exceed their expected value by 10 wins or more. Adam Wainwright, Brian McCann, Jason Hayward, Freddie Freeman, and Andrelton Simmons. So they were all actually later in the first round or even in the second round as well, so they weren't even top 10 or 20 picks. So maybe there's something there that they are really good at picking those second round guys that get overlooked the first time through. But I think at the end of the day, I would say majority luck than anything else.

I wish there were some way to quantify player development. I think Russell Carlton has written at BP about how that's just this giant question mark that we have no great way to analyze. have no great way to analyze. So I don't know whether you've had any thoughts about what we could do there or whether there just is no solution to being able to put a value on a team's player development. I think it is possible. One idea I've had in the past is actually tracking players moving throughout organizations before they reach the majors. You could potentially see, you know, maybe through prospect rankings, they shoot up after going to a new organization, then maybe that means the development's there.

But even that, I think the sample size is so small that it might be more likely just to kind of lead us in the wrong direction than really tell us anything truthful. And was there a lot of consistency? You mentioned that you divided it into early round picks and middle round and late round. Were there a lot of consistency. You mentioned that you divided it into early round picks and middle round and late round. Were there a lot of teams that excelled in all three or were above average in all three? Or was there any kind of relationship between a team being good at one and being good

at another? Yeah, I think that that was part of what led me to the conclusion that luck plays a big factor in this is that there isn't a ton of correlation between, I mean, you look at, let's say, the Red Sox, for example. In the early rounds, they're second, so good. Mid-rounds, they fall to third, so still good. But then in the late rounds, which is the fifth round on, they fall below average at an almost negative 10 wins differential. below average at an almost negative 10 wins differential. Or you have someone like the Padres who they are fourth in the late round and last in the early rounds. So that could be that there's different skills and different scouting systems

that, you know, some are good at from discerning the bus from the true top five picks, or maybe some are better at picking up kind of off the scrap heap near the late rounds. But if I had to guess, like I said earlier, I think it's, you know, just sometimes you just hit on a 30th round pick and then it works out for you. But I don't think you have too much skill involved in that. I think it's just a kind of a someone has to pick them. And that team just happened to do it that year. Yeah. And as people are kind of calibrating their expectations, watching the draft this week, you mentioned that it's only about 10%

of picks that ever reached the majors. Do you happen to know offhand what the average value approximately of a typical team's draft in a typical year is as far as cumulative war expected or produced down the road? Yeah, so I don't have it off the top of my head, but looking wouldn't be too hard to figure out. Basically, after about the fifth round, the expected wins above replacement for a player, for every player, is less than a half a win. So maybe 40 rounds of that, so you're looking at maybe 10 to 20 wins there. And then the first few rounds, anywhere from 17 wins from the first spot to just about half a win for the 300th pick. If I had to guess, I would say it's somewhere probably between 20 and 30 wins over the lifetime of all players pick. So it's not great. most teams won't pick a single Hall of Fame player in any draft any given year. And if you can get maybe one major league regular and two major league role players, you probably did okay that

year. And that's something you have to remember that one good player in a draft is actually a pretty good draft. Yeah. It helps. It probably explains why Jeff and I have never heard of any of these people. It helps the angels in record. You know, like having drafted Mike Trout once, that's like kudos. There's like 10 drafts for you. Just you're done. You don't have to do anything else. I don't want to put you in a position where you might have to say no to a question.

But just out of my own curiosity, you were looking at 15 years of data here. And obviously with a draft and so few overall success stories you you don't want to make the sample too small but did you happen to look at results maybe split up by time to look at whether drafts in the second half of your window were maybe any more successful than in the first i did not one thing i did keep in mind was like i said earlier the later picks have had less time to prove themselves. So the earlier draft picks, years 98 through 2006, let's say, they are the majority of what we're looking at because they've had the most time to impact the results. So even if we saw some potentially better picking

in later years, it'd be hard to tell even now, just because until everyone's retired, it's hard to really see the full picture. So we've got the Cardinals, the Red Sox, the Phillies, the Rangers, and the Diamondbacks were the top five by this measure. And the bottom five going from least bad to worst would be the Cubs, Royals, Mariners, Padres, and Orioles. Probably not shocking to any of the fans of those teams that those teams placed where they did, but it's still fun to have numbers and bar graphs. We always like that. Is there anything that we haven't covered? Any other aspects of the analysis that we haven't talked about yet? I don't think so. I think we kind of covered everything. Obviously, the biggest thing is going to be actually seeing the charts. I am a huge charts and graph nerd. So if I can't see them, it drives me crazy. So if you like graphs,

go ahead and take a look. It helps really paint the picture a lot better than just us talking about the graphs. But I think other than that, I think we covered just about everything. Yeah, I would say just maybe to try to put something in perspective, you came out with the overall war differential rankings, which is probably the chart people would look at the most. You have the Cardinals in number one with a difference, a positive difference of 177 wins above replacement above what you'd expect. Orioles are in last at negative 107. you'd expect. Orioles are in last at negative 107. So that would yield a difference over just 15 years of

284 war between those two teams. So that's a lot of war. That's a lot of wins that one team was getting that the other team wasn't. It's just really striking is all. Albert Pujols is good. Alright, well we will link to this post in the blog post at Fangraphs

and in the Facebook group. Ryan, is there anywhere you want to tell people to find you or any other work you want to plug? Yeah. Eventually, I'd like to get back to writing on the website where this article is posted. I think I've posted only two articles so far because about a week after I decided I wanted to write about baseball things, I got a job writing about baseball. So you can see some of my writing over there on inside injuries. And other than that, I just hope to get back to my long research projects, hopefully soon. Congratulations on the shortest amount of elapsed time between I want to write about baseball to I'm doing it. Yeah, it wasn't planned planned it was a job was posted on my college job board and i applied

like three days later so it's pure luck outstanding it's all luck all of us are lucky everything's like drafts like yep it's all luck and then we die or we don't maybe we don't die we just get lucky if you're really lucky all right thanks ryan thank you thank you you can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Anthony Rob Levski, Patty O'Connor, Danny Madden, Andrew Willey, and Joshua Roberts. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild now with over 6,000 members. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. As I mentioned earlier, you

can check out today's Ringer MLB show for more amateur draft coverage, and you can keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via email at podcast.fangraphs.com and via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to you all very soon. Bye.