Should major league teams generally use their first round draft picks on hitters?
Is the majority of the top hitting talent in a given amateur draft found in the first few rounds, while elite pitching talent can be found both early on and late?
Yes, you can blame fantasy baseball for putting these predications in my head. No, I’m not suggesting that fantasy baseball strategies should be applied to major league baseball, but I’m interested in the impact they would make.
I decided to explore my curiosities by – this is as complicated as this piece gets – looking at the deviation in overall draft position between top hitting and top pitching prospects. This way, I could determine if pitching prospects come with a lot more variation – at a higher risk – than hitting prospects.
Perhaps I was onto something. Or perhaps major league executives don’t typically enter the draft with a plan to spend x amount of dollars on pitching and x amount of dollars on hitting, as former Dodgers GM Fred Claire suggested to me, for good reason.
I arranged a loosely scientifically-based experiment to test my intuition.
Hypothesis : The deviation between the overall pick number that top hitting prospects are drafted is significantly smaller than that of top pitching prospects.
Methods:
Data
I used my current (September 2006) top 50 prospects list – not completely polished but I think it does the trick – to highlight the best hitting and pitching prospects in the game. My list included 31 hitters and 19 pitchers.
I then gathered the overall draft positions for every player (ex. Cameron Maybin = 10).
For international signees, I set up the basic conversions for signing bonus to draft slot value that are shown below:
|
Bonus |
Translation |
|
(millions of dollars) |
(draft slot value) |
|
3.0 |
3 |
|
2.0 |
10 |
|
1.5 |
18 |
|
1.0 |
30 |
|
0.5 |
69 |
|
>0.3 |
110 |
These conversations are based exclusively on 2005 and 2006 signing bonuses.
If I couldn’t find the amount that an international player signed for, I assumed that he signed for less than $300,000 (I consulted a prominent minors expert to make sure that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t find these bonuses).
Exceptions
I threw out Chris Young (493rd overall in 2001) and Andy LaRoche (1,171st overall in 2003) on the hitting side because they were drafted late due to abnormal circumstances – Young had his left forearm mutilated in a collision just before the draft; LaRoche appeared committed to attending Rice and unsignable.
None of the 19 pitchers had similar situations.
Results :
|
Stats |
Hitters |
Pitchers |
|
Median Slot |
23rd |
25th |
|
Ave. Slot |
41st |
43rd |
|
Standard Dev. |
52.1 |
40.2 |
Conclusions: To my surprise, top pitching prospects matched up amazingly well with top hitting prospects – the average draft slot and slot medians for hitters and pitchers are creepy close.
My hypothesis was way off. The deviation between the slots in which top hitting prospects were drafted was not significantly smaller than that of top pitching prospects. On the contrary, pitchers showed less variation, a sign that they had lived up to their draft position a little more frequently than hitters.
Applying my standard deviations to my median slots, hitters in my top 50 were typically taken between 1st overall and 75th; pitchers 1st and 65th.
It’s important to note that it would take quite a few years worth of top prospect lists before I had enough data to begin to feel comfortable drawing conclusions about the success rates between drafting pitchers vs. hitters.
But one solid conclusion can be made from my experiment: The fantasy baseball strategy of taking hitters early and finding pitchers late does not apply to Major League Baseball’s amateur draft.
I’d guess the main reason behind this is that major league executives do far more draft research than fantasy owners, nailing predictions on pitchers frequently despite not having a ton of data on them. Additionally, fantasy baseball drafts are typically just for the season ahead, while players have years to prove their worth after the amateur draft.
Another conclusion that I feel comfortable making is that major league executives – like Claire – look to be wise for typically investing equal amounts in hitting and pitching prospects, as neither type of prospect appears to have a significantly higher rate of emerging as top prospect.
Adam would love to hear from anyone who also dreams about abstract baseball theories. You can reach him at adamwfoster@gmail.com.