Our Day 1 Pitchers

Jeff Sackmann brought CollegeSplits.com back online in a limited fashion. The front page has links to the situational splits for all the college players drafted on the first day. Here are the pitchers we drafted—a pretty impressive bunch, really.

Clay Mortenson posted a 2.19 G:F this season, a 9.52 K/9, and allowed only 1 homer.

David Kopp: 2.63 G:F ; 7.21 K/9

Jess Todd: 2.00 G:F ; 12.71 K/9

Thomas Eager: 0.95 G:F ; 7.4 K/9

Aside from Eager (who cocked his cap for his team picture), all extreme groundball pitchers who can get the strikeout.

I'll be looking forward to seeing what these guys do against professionals come June 19th.

For those who were wondering, the Yankees took Pat Venditte, Jr. in the 45th round.

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Updated to answer a question Danup poses in the comments regarding the average G/F rates among college pitchers, to contexualize these rates.

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All we have available to answer that question are the figures for the players taken in the first five rounds from CollegeSplits.com. I wrote a script to read all those pitcher pages (those that end with '-p.html'), pull out the GO and AO fields, and crunch the numbers in a few different ways.

These are the results:

Ground outs:  4632

Air Outs:     3555

GO/AO:        1.3029535865

Average:      1.43645033142

Median GO/AO: 1.33333333333 (Brad Mills)

Min GO/AO:    0.612244897959 (Evan Reed)

Max GO/AO:    2.90909090909 (Chris Province)

The 54 pitchers taken in the first five rounds collected 4,362 outs via the groundball and 3,555 in the air. Dividing those totals gives you an average 1.303 GO:AO. Taking the 54 pitchers as individuals in a sorted list, the median pitcher as far as GO:AO had a 1.333 GO:AO, Brad Mills. He was picked in the fourth round out of Arizona by the Diamondbacks. Of the 54 pitchers, the one with the lowest GO:AO (the most extreme flyball pitcher) is Evan Reed, selected by Texas out of Cal Poly, where he closed for our pick, Thomas Eager. A third player (though a non-pitcher) selected from Cal Poly in the first five rounds is Grant Desme, who flies out four times for every three times he grounds out. I can't find (or am too lazy to find) detailed park factor data for Cal Poly, but I'd be unsurprised if they've got a very fast infield and a big outfield or some other combination of features that depresses groundball rates.

The most extreme worm-burner in the first five rounds of the 2007 draft was Chris Province, the closer for Southeastern Louisiana. Province was selected by the Red Sox two picks after we took slugger Kyle Russell. The 1.436 number listed as 'Average' above is just the mean of the 54 players ground-fly ratios.

To answer the question to the best of my ability: for the 54 pitchers in the first five rounds, the average G/F rate is somewhere around 1.3...