Archive for MLB Draft Week 2019

The 2019 MLB Draft is upon us, and a few threads that help comprise the full, 40-round tapestry have piqued our interest. The individual players involved, and the pirate crew of scouts and analysts who shape their organizations’ futures are, of course, annual focal points of the process. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, then you’ll also want to check out our prospect resource, The BOARD, which has player rankings and reports for this year’s draft class. It will be updated continuously over the next few days. You’ll also want to refer back to the draft order, pick values, and bonus pool amounts, which can be found here. For the latest gossip, please enjoy our recent mock draft.

Rounds one and two of the draft begin Monday, June 3 at 7pm Eastern. Day 2 includes rounds three through ten and begins Tuesday at 1pm; the final thirty rounds begin Wednesday at noon.

As is the case every year, this draft has some deeper themes and details. Here we outline some of the things we find fascinating, or that individuals who play a role in this process (amateur scouting personnel and player reps) are talking about.

Strategy Trends

Forward Thinking Now Means Tools
During the Moneyball era, traditional, scout-centric teams took upside/tools, while progressive teams leaned on statistical performance and perceived safety. These days with showcase stats, TrackMan and other advanced tech, better understanding of biomechanics, draft models, and the rising cost of elite major league free agents, the progressive clubs now feel comfortable taking upside players just like the traditional teams did. Tools can be quantified to some degree (i.e. spin rates, velo, exit velo, etc.) and, especially when a progressive scouting org is also a progressive player development org, teams are confident they can shape those tools into performance even if the player in question hasn’t performed. It moves the group of players valued due to their performance — think big conference college players with strong peripherals — down the board board if they don’t have sufficient physical talent. The Dodgers and Yankees, who both also seem less inclined to care about pitcher injury, are two prominent examples of teams who operate this way. Read the rest of this entry »

With the team prospect lists wrapping up today, multiple top 100 types having recently graduated, and the draft coming early next week, it’s a natural time to take a snapshot of where things stand in terms of the game’s farm system rankings.

We’ve taken Craig Edwards’ values for prospects by tier and totaled up what each of the 30 clubs had in their farm system over the winter. We also have a “Now” ranking with graduated prospects taken out (see the sidebar here for a full list of graduates), as well as a post-draft number based on our valuations of what teams’ draft picks are worth (in other words, our expectation of what we expect them to sign). Orgs are ranked based on the “Now” ranking; the total number of prospects and average per prospect value are also from that “Now” figure.

The previous version of this org ranking from the end of the 2018 season can be found here. Below is the grid with the breakdown of prospects by FV and club, so you can see the shape of a system:

There is some wiggle room in the team rankings, as you could argue that a team with a couple million dollars less in value, but with that value concentrated in many fewer prospects, actually has more trade value. As a thought exercise, you’d want a $100 million prospect more than 100 $1 million prospects, which this ranking would technically call equal. Exactly where that cutoff lies and what the discount rate would be for a multi-player package isn’t clear just yet. Would you need $120 million of value in two prospects to part with one $100 million prospect? How much would you need for a three player package? These are questions we plan on answering down the road.

There will be an update moving the FV of dozens of prospects right after the draft, and draftees who haven’t yet signed but who we expect to sign (essentially all top 10 round picks) will also be added right away. With that in mind, because THE BOARD will change in a significant way right after the draft, we wanted to capture how things looked both during the winter and in this pre-draft, pre-trade deadline moment. At some point soon after the draft concludes, we’ll have dynamic farm rankings on THE BOARD that will update whenever we change a pro prospect’s FV, which will happen frequently after this first update goes live.

Here is our latest mock draft, compiled using industry chatter from team personnel and player reps, our own in-person scouting, and educated guesses informed by how we believe individual teams have operated recently. For more information on the players mentioned below, head over to The BOARD, which we’ll continue to flood with player info in the coming days, as well as our first two mocks. New Jersey prep RHP Jack Leiter (Vanderbilt commit, son of Al Leiter) is the only player who definitely belongs in the top 78 picks on talent that isn’t in this projection, as he’s the most likely top talent to go to college based on his $4+ million asking price.

We’ll do two more mock before Day 1 of the draft kicks off — one on Monday morning, and a bare bones list of names shortly before the draft begins that evening. Read the rest of this entry »