Demography of the Good Player, Part II: By Draft Round

Note: this post contains three-dimensional pie charts, less because they’re particularly well suited to presenting data clearly and more because the author’s whole life is an exercise in questionable decision-making.

What follows represents the second in a three-part series devoted to producing and analyzing objective demographic data regarding those players who’ve become good major leaguers. On Wednesday, I considered good players by their amateur origins — i.e. whether they were signed to professional contracts out of college, junior college, etc. In this installment, I look at good players by the round in which they were originally selected during the amateur draft (which obviously excludes any consideration of those players signed as international free agents).

The work here is an extension of Jeff Sullivan’s recent attempt to answer a question notable both for its simplicity and importance. The question: how many good players were good prospects?

Sullivan found that about a third of good players weren’t good prospects — or, at least, about a third of them never appeared on Baseball America’s annual top-100 prospect list. They weren’t all non-prospects, of course, but a sufficient enough percentage of top-100 prospects fail such that, for a rookie-eligible player to expressly not appear among that group immediately renders his chances of succeeding in the majors pretty low.

I’ve used a similar methodology as Sullivan did in terms of defining certain terms. A “good” player is any one who produced 3.0 WAR or greater in a particular season. For pitcher WAR I’ve used a 50-50 split between the FIP and runs-allowed iterations of WAR. Where Sullivan used three years’ worth of data, I’ve used five, hoping that the larger sample might be of some benefit.

Also note that, with a view to creating a larger sample, hat I’ve used player-seasons and not merely individual players. So, for example, Dustin Pedroia produced five “good” seasons between 2010 and -14. Therefore, he’s counted five times. I was originally concerned that the difference in results might be dramatic between player-seasons and mere players. In fact, the relationship is rather regular: among batters and pitchers, among college and prep players, the average good player produced nearly (but not quite) two good seasons.

Good Players by Draft Round
Typically, organizations are attempting to draft players roughly in order of overall future value — or a combination of future value and risk. Signability is also an issue, of course: prep players have leverage insofar as they’re also typically committed to a college at which they can play. Overall, though, clubs are attempting to draft players in order of likely future success. If they were perfect at it — or if prospects improved at entirely predictable rates — every good player would have been signed originally as a first-round pick. Obviously, that’s not the case. So assessing good players by round reveals either (a) the variance inherent to the development of prospects or (b) the degree to which front offices are failing to identify those traits in amateur prospects which lead to major-league success. The former contingency is probably more likely than the latter, given the considerable research front offices conduct ahead of making their earliest draft picks. That said, there appear to be some inefficiencies where junior-college amateurs, in particular, are involved.

Here are the 227 good seasons produced by players who were signed out of high school:

Most good players who were also signed out of high school were selected in the first two rounds (including the supplemental portion following the first round) — about 70% of them. This is unsurprising: not only is that the range within which the most conspicuously talented players would be taken, but also, high-school players selected in later rounds are incentivized to attend college with a view towards further improving their draft stock. Consider: no good batter between 2010 and -14 signed as a prep player later than the 17th round. That was Mike Napoli, who signed for $100 thousand — a sum more commonly found within the top-10 rounds. In other words, unless they’re being duly compensated, high-school prospects are likely to opt for a university (or at least junior college) program where it might be possible to exhibit their virtues at the collegiate level.

Here, one finds the 205 good seasons produced by players originally signed out of a four-year college:

The distribution is a bit more even among this group than among the prep players. Here, the first two rounds account for only 60% of good players — about 10 points fewer, that, than what we found with high-school signees. In other words: players selected in the later rounds out of college are more likely both to (a) sign and then (b) develop into good major leaguers.

There are a number of players within this group who’ve provided substantial returns on their respective teams’ original investments. Ian Kinsler, for example — who’s produced three-plus wins in four of the last five seasons — Ian Kinsler signed with Texas for just $30 thousand after having been selected by that organization in the 17th round of the 2003 draft. The Cardinals’ Matt Carpenter, meanwhile, received just a $1 thousand bonus after having been selected by St. Louis in the 13th round of the 2009 draft out of TCU. He’s produced over 10 wins over the last two seasons.

The success of college draftees comes with one caveat, in that it applies much more rigorously to batters than pitchers. Indeed, only five good seasons over the past five years — of 77 total — only five good seasons have been produced by a pitcher who was signed out of college later than the 10th round: David Robertson (17th round), Collin McHugh (18th), Dallas Braden (24th), Tanner Roark (25th), and Jonathan Sanchez (27th). Even Roark is an exception: he pitched in the independent Frontier League between his final year at Illinois and first one with the Rangers organization.

Finally, here are the 52 good seasons by players signed out of junior college:

This is striking: only one player to produce three or more wins in a season since 2010 was signed in the first round out of a junior college. That was Bryce Harper, who actually acquired a GED after his sophomore year of high school so he could enter the draft earlier than most high schoolers. Apart from Harper, however, there have been a number of good players who were signed out of junior colleges in later rounds. Some of them were draft-and-follow types, like Jose Bautista (20th round) and Lorenzo Cain (17th). Many weren’t, however. Howie Kendrick was drafted in the 10th round out of St. Johns River Community College in Florida and signed for $100 thousand. Albert Pujols pretty famously signed for just $60 thousand after having been selected out of Maple Woods Community College in the 13th round.

This data appears to suggest that organizations have been less aggressive than is ideal with regard to drafting junior-college players. I asked lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel what might be the cause of this apparent conservatism. McDaniel’s explanation, in brief: a player who’s graduated to junior-college ball has, almost by definition, exhibited some manner of obvious weakness. Perhaps that’s a physical weakness; perhaps it’s a behavioral one. Whatever the cause, it’s seems like it might be substantial enough (on average) to give teams pause.