To many sports fans conditioned to the pomp and primp surrounding the NFL and NBA drafts, Major League Baseball's annual June draft is a considerably more existential affair: If no one has heard of the players, can the draft make a sound?
With almost every pick being an anonymous high-school or college player -- and with one-third of first-round picks never reaching the major leagues at all -- the baseball draft could be mistaken for a tree falling, unnoticed, in the woods. But some teams do far better than others. Dr. Rany Jazayerli wanted to figure out which ones they were.
By day a dermatologist in suburban Chicago, Jazayerli, a longtime writer for Baseball Prospectus, spent several months this spring developing a sophisticated system for examining the baseball draft (to be held Tuesday).
His analysis showed how some clubs (like the Phillies and the A's) leveraged draft picks well, while others (like the Mets and the Pirates) squandered opportunities left and right. He also found that some common draft wisdom -- college players are better bets than high-schoolers, for example -- might no longer be true.
"I'm skeptical of any conclusion until it's proven to be so," Jazayerli said. "I have a very healthy distrust of other people's opinions."
Most previous studies looked at who reached the major leagues -- giving equal credit to Alex Rodriguez and Alex Arias -- or recalled a famous anecdote, like how the Cubs snagged the future Hall of Famer Greg Maddux in the second round in 1984.
Jazayerli, however, appears to have been more exacting. He determined the average historical value of every pick from No. 1 to No. 100, using a Baseball Prospectus metric called Wins Above Replacement Player. He then compared each draft pick's performance with his expected value. (Wins Above Replacement Player estimates the number of victories a player has contributed beyond the average Class AAA-type player.)
The results showed what many baseball insiders have long suspected, that the Phillies, despite otherwise underachieving, were in fact the best drafters in baseball for most of the 1990s.
For example, when the team used the No. 46 overall pick in 1993 on Scott Rolen, then in high school in rural Indiana and now a Cardinal, it got a player whose future performance (63.2 WARP) far exceeded the average of 5.0 that spot usually generates. The Phillies have succeeded with picks high and low in the top few rounds: Pat Burrell (No. 1 overall in 1998) has had several top slugging years, and shortstop Jimmy Rollins (No. 46 overall in 1996) and the left-hander Randy Wolf (No. 54 in 1997) have been All-Stars.
The worst-ranked drafters are no surprise, having usually been the teams that have languished for most of the past 10 years because of their inability to develop young players who earn relatively small salaries for their first four to six seasons. Ranking last were the Pirates, who were such poor judges of talent that they released their best pick, the right-hander Bronson Arroyo, before he developed with the Red Sox. Other perennial cellar-dwellers like the Brewers and the Tigers also ranked in the bottom five.
Twenty-two of 24 Mets picks underperformed, among them colossal busts like the high-school pitchers Kirk Presley (No. 8, 1993) and Geoff Goetz (No. 6, 1997). The Yankees also had only two selections that panned out, the 1996 picks Eric Milton and Nick Johnson, but always drafted low enough that no pick was that valuable to begin with.
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