On the Origin of High Draft Picks

The Cleveland Guardians made history at the Fort Worth Stockyards on Sunday night, drafting Oregon State second baseman Travis Bazzana first overall. I planted my flag on Bazzana Island back in February, and noted that he could become the first Australian player drafted no. 1 overall, as well as the first player born and raised anywhere other than the U.S. or its dependencies. Keith Law pointed out that because no. 2 overall pick Chase Burns was born in Italy (though raised in Tennessee), 2024 marked the first time that both of the top two picks were born outside the U.S.

Had the Guardians chosen University of Georgia third baseman Charlie Condon, a different kind of history could’ve been made. Condon would’ve been the third no. 1 overall pick from Marietta, Georgia, after Dansby Swanson and Kris Benson, which would’ve given that city of some 60,000 people the distinction of being the only municipality in America to produce three no. 1 overall picks.

Why should anyone care? I concede I can’t make a compelling argument. I personally only noticed the Condon connection for two reasons: First, my inexhaustible thirst for knowledge of useless trivia, particularly as it concerns amateur baseball. I’ve been attempting to commit to memory the alma mater of every college-educated major leaguer. You know, for fun. This is fun for me.

Second, my wife is from Marietta, and so I’ve spent many a night sleeping under the watchful eye of the Big Chicken.

The Big Chicken is a 56-foot-tall sign that sits atop the KFC on Cobb Parkway. It has rotating googly eyes and a beak that opens and closes. But it doesn’t close all the way. It used to, but actual birds would sit on the bottom, um, jaw, I guess you’d call it, and get squished when the Big Chicken’s mouth would close. It’s a landmark in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Cobb County’s answer to the Eiffel Tower or the Sagrada Família, and a likeness of it hangs in my home.

But I digress.

Condon ended up not going no. 1 overall, leaving Marietta tied with San Diego and nearby Atlanta as the leading producers of no. 1 draft picks. Nevertheless, my interest was piqued. I asked myself: Where do top picks come from?

So I put together a list of the origins of every top-five pick in the draft era — exactly 300 of them — as well as their alma maters and hometowns. Most of the information came from Baseball Reference, though occasionally I had to turn to Baseball Cube to find the high school of a college draftee from the olden days.

Both sites usually list both a player’s birthplace and high school location, but the concept of a “hometown” is a bit nebulous. I used the latter data point — location of the player’s high school — as a proxy for hometown. It’s not a perfect system. Some families move around a lot, while many high school baseball players live in one municipality but attend school in another, either because they go to private school or because they attend a public school with a large catchment area. But it’s better to be consistent, and this information was readily available for almost all players.

I did override this in the rare cases where the school was residential and I knew the player’s actual hometown, and there were a couple instances where no high school was listed on any site; in those scenarios I defaulted to the player’s birthplace. There are also two players — Danny Goodwin and J.D. Drew — who were drafted in the top five twice. I counted their selections individually for the purposes of comparing high school and college selections, but not for the purposes of crediting their hometowns — Peoria, Illinois, and Valdosta, Georgia, respectively — with producing multiple top picks. (There were also two different players named Matt Williams, one of whom is the guy you’ve heard of.)

So what did I learn?

For starters, in the history of the draft, the split between high school and college players in the top-five picks is almost even.

The two juco players are Bryce Harper and Alex Fernandez. Fernandez is listed as a four-year player on B-Ref, probably because his alma mater, Miami Dade College, was Miami-Dade Community College when he transferred there. Fernandez was drafted 24th overall out of high school in 1988, went to the University of Miami for a year, and then transferred to MDCC so he could get back in the draft a year early. The White Sox, who picked him fourth, brought him to the majors in his draft year after just eight minor league starts, so it all worked out.

I remembered that Fernandez and Harper are the only two juco players to win the Golden Spikes Award (speaking of useless amateur baseball trivia), so I spent more time than I would have liked tracking down what year MDCC turned into a four-year institution and confirming that it was after Fernandez left. I didn’t find any other similar situations among top-five picks in B-Ref’s database.

Fernandez and Harper went to juco in order to get into the draft early, and three of the four top-five picks from independent ball all went that route because of signing hangups. Drew, Luke Hochevar, and Kumar Rocker were all first-round college picks, didn’t sign for whatever reason, and instead of returning to school played in indy ball until the next draft came around. The fourth indy ball pick was Ariel Prieto, one of the first players to come to the U.S. from Cuba post-embargo. Because Prieto came directly to the United States, he was subject to the draft, which is one reason why Cuban defectors in the years since have tended to establish residency elsewhere before signing with a big league team.

The balance between high school and college draftees in the top five is a new thing, and it’s not going to last long. For several reasons — NIL, the transfer portal, the truncation of both the draft and the minors — the top of the draft has become exceptionally college-heavy in the 2020s.

Over the past 10 years, there have been 31 top-five picks from four-year colleges, against just 18 high schoolers and one indy ball player, Rocker, who ought to count as a college pick. Over the past five drafts, it’s been 16 college players against eight high schoolers, plus Rocker. This year, the top five — the top eight, actually — were all from four-year colleges.

But which four-year colleges, you might ask?

Now, each of these schools represents a moment in time. Arizona State was once the dominant program in the country. (These eight top-five picks for the Sun Devils don’t include Barry Bonds, the no. 6 overall pick in 1985.) In the first 14 drafts, ASU produced five top-five picks, including three who went first overall. But Spencer Torkelson is the only top-five pick the program has had in the past 30 drafts.

Wichita State used to be the dominant program in the Midwest: Between 1981 and 1996, the Shockers went to seven College World Series, won a national championship in 1989, and produced four top-five picks. They haven’t been back to Omaha since, and have only one top-five pick (Alec Bohm) over the past 25 years. Four of Rice’s five top-five picks came in a 10-year period that also included the program’s only national title.

Vanderbilt, meanwhile, has had seven top-five picks, not counting Rocker, all since 2007. Four of LSU’s five top-five picks have come since 2012, including the 1-2 punch of Paul Skenes and Dylan Crews last year.

The draft has been around a long time, in short, and college baseball empires rise and fall.

All told, 38 institutions have had two or more top-five picks drafted directly from that school. These are mostly four-year colleges, but not exclusively. Thirteen high schools have produced multiple top-five picks, including players who stopped at college first. Notre Dame High School of Sherman Oaks, California, is the only high school to produce three.

So what jumps out, obviously, is that Ken Griffey Jr. and Barry Larkin went to the same high school, as did Joe Mauer and Paul Molitor. And if you really want your brain wrinkled, Mauer and Molitor both retired with a career batting average of .306. The third top-five pick out of St. Paul, Minnesota, is Dave Winfield, who went to public school. But thanks to Molitor and Winfield, Marlins pitcher Max Meyer seems doomed to be the first player to attend the University of Minnesota, get drafted in the first five picks, and fail to reach 3,000 career hits. Poor kid. (The Upton brothers graduated from different high schools, for those who sense an obvious absence here.)

You’ll notice that not one but two San Diego high schools have produced multiple top-five picks. San Diego is the most prolific city in America for producing draft picks at that level.

And if anything, this list undersells San Diego’s claim to the title of Draftville, USA. The city’s universities have produced four more top-five picks — Kris Bryant and Brian Matusz from the University of San Diego, Stephen Strasburg and Travis Lee from San Diego State — none of whom went to high school in the city.

And then there are players from the various suburbs. I thought about consolidating picks into regions, for instance to roll Atlanta and its various extremities into one metro area. But when I thought about doing that for the big cities out west, I realized that everything I know about Southern California geography comes from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, so I have zero clue which towns are near Los Angeles versus Anaheim versus San Diego.

As a compromise, I offer this list of states with 10 or more top-five picks.

Surprise, surprise, it’s a list of the most populous states in the union, with Georgia punching above its weight.

Even with 300 picks to choose from, not every state has put a player in the top five: Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming have all been blanked. (Three top-five picks attended the University of Arkansas, while another went to BYU, but none of those players were natives of either Arkansas or Utah.)

And it’s not just because California, Texas, Florida, and Georgia hogged all the domestic talent. Five jurisdictions that aren’t U.S. states have put a player in the top five in the draft: Cuba (Prieto), New South Wales (Bazzana), British Columbia (Adam Loewen), the District of Columbia (Danny Hultzen), and Puerto Rico (Carlos Correa).

So what’s the takeaway? Top draft picks come from states with big populations and warm weather. Aside from that scintillating and novel bit of information, Marietta has to get more prospects in the pipeline if it wants to catch San Diego. The Big Chicken has the power to grant miracles, but it’s hungry for talent and must be fed.