What Team Drafts the Best Talent?

Back in the eighties and nineties… they drafted Ken Griffey, Tino Martinez, Shawn Estes, Ron Villone, Jason Varitek, Alex Rodriguez, Gil Meche and Jose Cruz were all pretty good to MVP quality players at some point in their careers. As far as I’m concerned, Griffey and A-Rod trump the entire Phillies list.

2006 – Max Scherzer RHP (11)
2005 – Justin Upton OF (1)
2004 – Stephen Drew SS (15)
2003 – Conor Jackson 1B/3B (19)
2003 – Carlos Quentin OF (29)
2002 – Sergio Santos SS (27)
2001 – Jason Bulger P (22)
2000 – No Pick
1999 – Corey Myers SS (4)

Not really sure how good Scherzer is going to be yet, but you have 5 or 6 regulars in there as well as the best young SS in the game, and a guy who just had a breakout year after getting traded out of Arizona.

You could put the Rays in here too, but drafting in the top 10 every year for the past 10 years really should do wonders for your farm system.

This probably also suggests there is a five-year lag or so between good drafting periods and success. The Phillies enjoyed their world series ring about six years after a fantastic drafting period (1998-2002). Hopefully, this type of success will translate to the Cards with Rasmus, Wallace, Perez and company…

The Padres had 6 picks in the top 50 and ended up with only one guy out of the six making the majors…and he was out of baseball a year later.

The Orioles had 7 picks in the top 50 and ended up with 2 of them getting big league service time: Larry Bigbie and Brian Roberts, who was the last pick of the seven but by far the most successful.

Talk about an incredible amount of busts in one first round. Looking at the first round and the supplemental round that year there were exactly 8 guys who ended up being MLB regulars for at least a year out of the first 50 picks — and that counts such great talents as Larry Bigbie, Eric Munson, Mike MacDougal, and Jimmy Gobble.

and I pretty much am biased towards teams that successfully draft superior players. I don’t like the measurements that just count how many players make it to the bigs, because I think that skews the data. A lot of guys that make it are less than replacement level and fall in the F.A.T. category.

I took a look at the best players of 2008, who drafted/signed them, and where they came from. I restricted my list to the top 50 position players in MLB as defined by Gross Production Average (GPA) and the top 50 pitchers as defined by Pitcher Runs Created (PRC). I only considered starting pitchers, so be aware of that. I also added Mark Teixeira, Manny Ramirez, CC Sabathia, and Adam Wainwright to the lists for a total of 104 players.

It looks like the teams that drafted the most players in this population were the Braves, Expos/Nats, and Rangers with six each, followed by the Brewers, Mariners, Rays and Red Sox with five. Honorable mention goes to the Angels, Cubs, Diamondbacks, and Twins with four. The Cardinals only drafted two: Albert and Dan Haren.

Of the teams with six players on the list the Braves were the only one without an amateur free agent in the mix, so I guess they actually drafted the most players. However, I think it should be noted that they are the only team among the leaders with a first overall draft pick (Chipper Jones) included. Interesting footnote is that there were a total of six players on the list that were first overal picks and not one of them was a pitcher. Five of the six were high school players. Remarkably, the Expos/Nats don’t have a single first round pick on their list while the Rangers had three top ten picks. The Brewers had three top ten picks as well and two of the Rays picks were top tens.

17 of the 104 picks were international amateur free agents, 37 were college picks, and 47 were high school picks. Three were from the JUCO ranks. The split between College (20) and High School (23) was pretty even for position players while High Schoolers (24) outnumbered College players (17) fairly significantly on the pitching side. I would be happy to post the data, but I am pretty clueless with HTML.

My first reaction to your title was: “which” should have been used instead of “what”. I thought the general rule was that “what” is used when specific information is requested from open-ended possible range, and “which” is used when specific information is requested from a restricted range of possibilities. But then I read “where the number of options is shared knowledge among speakers and listeners, what + noun is often used in informal contexts.” So you are probably right.

Sorry, non-baseball tangent.