It’s draft day, so I thought a draft related link post was in order. Baseball America has covered the draft from every possible angle you might imagine, but since I’m a nerd and I like numerical analysis, this draft history piece by Matt Eddy is my favorite part of their draft coverage. While Eddy isn’t the first to look at a series of drafts and see where the strengths and weaknesses have been, he updates the results to cover 1989-2008, and he breaks down the results in a way that is easy to digest.

I could excerpt a ton of different parts of the story, which is why you should just go read the whole thing. Here’s one part that stands out, though:

Despite the large disparity in graduation rates for college position players and high school ones, the gap in impact rates is much narrower. About 14 in 100 college players in our study have accumulated at least 10 WAR for their careers, while nearly 11 in 100 high schoolers reached that level. In fact, the star-of-stars high school position players (Top 5) produced more wins above replacement (1,091) than their college counterparts (1,016), which is remarkable when you consider their lower graduation rate, lower impact rate and the fact that prep stars spot roughly three years of experience to college players at the time of their draft selection, a phenomenon that ought to make collegians in the later years of our sample considerably more productive.

High school position players keep track with collegians if you expand the impact threshold to 20 career WAR (34 high school, 31 college), 30 career WAR (17, 17) or 40 career WAR (11, 11).

Eddy finds something similar when he looks at pitchers as well. Basically, the idea that college players are significantly better bets than high school players simply doesn’t seem to be true anymore, if it ever was. The flameout rate of high school players is much higher, but almost the entirety of the difference is made up of college guys who get to the big leagues but never amount to much. In terms of actually finding talent who produce significant value — and it’s not like +10 WAR is a crazy high bar — high school players have done nearly as well, despite the fact that (as Eddy notes) the three year head start they have should bias the results of active players towards the college guys.

Anyway, the whole thing is worth reading, as are the rest of Eddy’s articles on the draft’s history. And, despite what might have been written about the draft 10 years ago, don’t freak out if your favorite team takes a high school kid tonight. Even if they draft a high school pitcher. It’s okay, really.

After finally giving up on the idea of Danny Espinosa being able to produce while playing with a fractured wrist, the Nationals have promoted top prospect Anthony Rendon to take his place on the roster. And, by doing so, the Nationals are going to become the latest team to join the growing trend of changing the second base profile.

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Last night, ESPN reported that Major League Baseball was preparing to suspend 20 players associated with the BioGenesis clinic after convincing Anthony Bosch to cooperate with their investigation. In the report, they included a list of players that are potentially on the to-be-suspended list. That list of names:

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The Angels won 89 games last year despite starting Mike Trout in the minors. After they promoted at the end of April, they played .580 baseball the rest of the way. Over the winter, they added Josh Hamilton, but more importantly, they added the Houston Astros to the AL West. 19 games against the Astros was supposed to give the western contenders a significant advantage, as they could pencil in 12 or 13 easy wins against a team that wasn’t even trying to compete.

Whoops. The Astros just swept the Angels — in Anaheim — and have now beaten LA’s other expensive disappointment in seven of their first 10 match-ups. In fact, the Astros may end up being the primary reason that the Angels miss the playoffs.

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The Major League domestic amateur draft takes place this week, kicking off with the first and second rounds on Thursday night, then continuing on with rounds 3-10 on Friday and rounds 11-40 on Saturday. We haven’t done a ton of draft preview stuff because that’s simply not our strength, and there are a lot of other places — Baseball America, most notably — who specialize in high quality draft coverage, and will give you all the information you need if you want to know who is going to be drafted where.

That doesn’t mean we don’t care about the draft, though. For the basics of the new draft system, you can check out Wendy Thurm’s first and second primers on how the setup works, and then J.D. Sussman asked whether or not we even need a draft to maintain competitive balance earlier this morning. Those pieces are worth reading.

I’m going to throw my hat into the ring of draft related articles, because I want to write about the order of picks in the 2013 first round, and because that selection order highlights the biggest problem with the current draft structure: the penalization of success.

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The Detroit Tigers starters currently have a 2.54 FIP, which translates into a FIP- of 62, easily the best in baseball. In fact, it’s easily the best FIP- in baseball history, and as I wrote a month ago, Detroit’s starters have a chance to write themselves into the history books with their 2013 performance. But, instead of just writing a post updating their pace — they’d basically need to post a FIP- of 83 the rest of the way to break the record for best FIP relative to league average — I thought it might be interesting to look at how the best rotations in baseball history dominated.

For instance, the narrative around the Tigers current rotation mostly has to do with their strikeouts. They are on pace to shatter the all time record for strikeouts by a rotation, and the swing-and-miss stuff possessed by guys like Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer makes it easy to credit the strikeout rate as the primary driver of their success. However, once you compare the individual components to the league average, their strikeout rate becomes just a part of the story, and maybe not even the biggest part.

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As I write this, the Pittsburgh Pirates are tied for the second best record in baseball. They also happen to be tied for second place in their own division, because the Cardinals are the only team with a better record while the Reds have matched Pittsburgh’s 33-20 start, making the NL Central the most competitive and most interesting division in the sport right now. The Cardinals are Reds are both excellent teams, and we should expect both to continue to win at a good clip over the rest of the year, but what about the Pirates? Is this another first half mirage that will lead to a second half collapse, or do Pittsburgh fans finally have a contender to root for?

I think the answer to both of those questions is probably yes; the Pirates are playing over their heds and will likely regress over the next four months, but their strong start and their overall talent level should keep them in the race to the very end.

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Passive Hitter“, which examined the change in the rate of swings in Major League Baseball over the last 25 years. While a host of writers have written about the rise of Moneyball philosophies as a reason for why strikeout numbers are on the rise, I noted that the data shows that hitters are actually swinging at basically the same rate now as they did two decades ago. The evidence simply doesn’t support the idea that hitters have become significantly more passive at the plate.

However, as several readers pointed out, the point being posed most repeatedly by Tom Verducci isn’t that hitters are not swinging often enough, it’s that they’re not swinging often enough in the right situations. As a follow-up to his original post, he wrote this last week:

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