The 13th pick in the draft

by giveml on May 27, 2008 9:58 PM EDT

The Cardinals have the 13th overall pick in the MLB draft and have stated they are leaning in the direction of drafting a college pitcher. Mildly surprising, given the pretty sorry organizational track record of drafting college pitchers in round 1, but given the overall improvement in the last few drafts I am on board with whatever the team wants to do. Just get us a good pitcher who maybe can be a top half of the rotation starter and maybe throws left-handed.

My interest isn’t so much in speculating on who they should take as it is on what strategies seem to offer the best payback. A very small number of you may recall the discussion last December that tried to analyze where the very best pitchers come from. I took a look at all active MLB starting pitchers with at least 1000 IPs and an ERA+ of greater than 110. It turns out that 55% of those pitchers were drafted out of high school, while only 24% were drafted out of college. The remaining 21% were amateur free agents from various foreign countries. If you want to revisit the post here is the (ugly) link: http://www.vivaelbirdos.com/2007/12/11/13108/090#1380152

It seems like if you are going to draft a pitcher in the first round your goal should be to find one who will be a superior starting pitcher or a dominating closer a la Chris Perez (college pitcher taken in the supplemental round). My previous study, by virtue of the fact that I was looking for guys with long track records of success, seems a bit dated so I decided to review this topic from a different angle.

I have endeavored to get a view of the success of college draftees vs. high schoolers with an eye toward younger pitchers. So I decided to look at pitchers who should be 22-26 years old and compare their success rates based on whether they went into pro ball out of high school or after the college experience. I haven’t made an effort to verify the ages of the pitchers in question, but have tracked the high school graduating classes of 2000-2004 (more or less). My assumption is that 1st round picks from college are generally three years removed from high school. To that end I have identified all the college pitchers drafted in the top 30 picks in the 2003-2007 drafts and the high schoolers selected and signed from the 2000-2004 drafts. This allows us to compare essentially the same “crop” of players.

I have tried to rate the two populations based on current competitive level. I have totally arbitrarily assigned a point value of:

0 no longer in professional baseball

1 A ball

2 Advanced A ball

3 AA ball

4 AAA ball

5 MLB

If a prospect has reached the big leagues, then I have further rated the draft class by the number of MLB wins it has accumulated.

Of the kids that graduated HS in 2004, only one pitcher has reached the big leagues (Phillip Hughes) and he has yet to win a game. There were nine college pitchers taken in the 2007 draft and 7 HS pitchers taken in the 2004 draft. The college guys have an average level of 2.22, or slightly above Advanced A ball, while the HS guys have a rating of 3.14 or slightly above AA ball. The best college prospects are probably David Price of Vanderbilt who has yet to throw a professional inning and either Casey Weathers or Donald Simmons who are both doing well at AA. The best HS prospects are probably the aforementioned Phillip Hughes and Cincinnati’s Homer Bailey. Seneca, MOs Scott Elbert would probably get a mention here if not for shoulder surgery.

The 2003 high school graduates are far more heavily represented in the college selections from the 2006 draft (12) than the high schoolers who signed in 2003 (3). The rating system yields a 3.75 total, nearly AAA, for the college kids and a 3.00 for the HS kids. This is somewhat deceiving as 2 of the 3 HSers drafted, John Danks and Chad Billingsley, have already made it to the big leagues while the other draftee is Jeff Allison. Allison is trying to make a comeback from drug addiction and become the mound version of Josh Hamilton. He is currently in the Marlins system in the Florida State League. Five of the 12 college draftees have made it to MLB and they are Tim Lincecum, Max Scherzer, Andrew Miller, Luke Hochevar, and Ian Kennedy. Interestingly enough, Danks and Billingsley have won more combined MLB games with 32 compared to the college guys 26.

The 2002 class is very interesting and makes a strong case for drafting the HS pitcher. The seven kids taken from this class have already amassed 117 MLB victories for a grand total of 18 victories for the nine college pitchers taken in 2005. The average rating for the college kids is 3.67. Despite the fact that Chris Gruler (#3 overall) is out of baseball after a series of shoulder problems, the HS class is still rated higher at 3.86. I would be happy with a rotation of the five high schoolers who have made it to the bigs already: Zack Greinke, Scott Kazmir, Cole Hamels, Matt Cain, and Adam Loewen. The stars of the college class are Matt Garza and Mike Pelfrey.

The 2001 high school seniors are heavily represented as 8 of them signed out of high school and another 14 signed three years later as college pitchers. The ratings are pretty equal with the HS kids having a slight edge at 3.38 vs. 3.29 for the college guys. The HSers were really hurt by Colt Griffin, the first documented 100 mph HS pitcher, having retired from pro ball in 2006. MLB wins were also pretty equal with 75 for the college draftees and 71 for HS. Best college pitcher would be Jered Weaver and the best HS pitcher would be Jeremy Bonderman.

The 2000 class was pretty much of a bust with four college pitchers and three high school pitchers already out of baseball. This class has the lowest overall rating of 2.42 for the college guys and 2.63 for the HS kids. The college kids have the edge in MLB wins with 50 and Chad Cordero has saved 128 MLB games. Best college pitchers were Cordero and David Aardsma. Best HS pitchers were Boof Bonser and some guy named Adam Wainwright.

Summary

HS Yr	#Signed	% MLB	%MLB	Rating	MLB Wins
2000	8	2	25%	2.63	37
2001	8	2	25%	3.38	71
2002	7	5	71%	3.86	117
2003	3	2	67%	3	32
2004	7	1	14%	3.14	0
	33	12	36%	3.202	257

Coll Yr
2003	7	3	43%	2.42	50
2004	14	3	21%	3.29	75
2005	9	2	22%	3.67	18
2006	12	5	42%	3.75	32
2007	9	0	0%	2.22	0
	51	13	25%	3.07	175

Top Five College Picks

1. Tim Lincecum

2. Justin Verlander

3. Jered Weaver

4. Matt Garza

5. Chad Cordero

Honorable Mention

1. Max Scherzer

2. Ian Kennedy

3. Luke Hochevar

Top Five HS Picks

1. Scott Kazmir

2. Cole Hammels

3. Zach Greinke

4. Adam Wainwright

5. Chad Billingsley

Honorable Mention

1. Jeremy Bonderman

2. Matt Cain

3. Boof Bonser

I know this is all pretty small sample size and luck plays a pretty big part in the success of drafting young pitchers whether they be college or high school. I would be pretty careful about drawing too many conclusions here, but there is one that is pretty safe. Combined with the earlier study of veteran pitchers, it seems clear that the notion that HS pitchers are more risky than college pitchers is completely unfounded. The HS pitchers in this sample were more likely to reach the major leagues (36% v. 25%), progressed slightly further through the system (3.2 v. 3.1), and have already won 82 more MLB games than the college pitchers in spite of the fact that there were 51 college pitchers taken in the study period as opposed to only 33 high school pitchers.

As a final note, these data do not include the fact that Clayton Kershaw is already pitching for the Dodgers, while his high school classmates who went on to college won’t be draft eligible until June ’09.

7 recs | Comment 36 comments

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Comments

very good post

i learned a lot from this FanPost; thanks for doing the research.

by lboros on May 28, 2008 8:11 AM EDT 0 recs

One small quibble

Phil Hughes won five games for the Yankees last year. Otherwise, nicely done.

by roarke on May 28, 2008 8:27 AM EDT 0 recs

wow giveml....

you have consistently been putting up the best fanposts on this site, in my opinion at least. i really like your ideas, and i like how much research you have backing up each post. nice job

"I don't want to play golf. When I hit a ball, I want someone else to go chase it."- Rogers Hornsby

by redbirds8233 on May 28, 2008 4:04 PM EDT 0 recs

just tipped my hat

in your general direction. i decided to put my insomnia to work doing research.

Those Pilgrims ain't lookin' so proud now...

by giveml on May 28, 2008 4:39 PM EDT up 0 recs

+1

I agree. I don’t miss to many of your fanposts, as I always seem to learn a lot. Thanks for the effort.

by etp_stl on Jun 1, 2008 8:53 AM EDT up 0 recs

I don’t have exceptionally strong opinions on certain individuals, like some do, mainly because I don’t study the scouting reports and videos of the draftees extensively. But from a bigger picture perspective, I do think the farm system is in a better place than it has been in quite a while. I’m hoping there are a number of high school arms taken this time around for that reason. Doesn’t necessarily have to be in the first couple rounds. We should have some decent depth in the organization throughout, let’s take advantage of that luxury and take some shots at some home run picks with a longer window for development.

by Merry CRasmus on May 28, 2008 5:18 PM EDT 0 recs

Terrific and informative. Many thanks

by akaitori on May 28, 2008 5:56 PM EDT 0 recs

disagree

I must disagree with your conclusion. You linked to your response to my original diary – when I ran the numbers for all the HS vs College pitchers from 1999-2006 and the percentage of draftees that made it to the majors was lower for HS than college every year. HS pitchers are a riskier draft pick.

I tend to think, at this point, that a good college pitcher is a more reliable pick, will make a contribution at the MLB level sooner, and that still has the potential to be a dominant pitcher. I do not think that taking college pitchers is bad – as many here do. Taking a mediocre college pitcher over a good HS pitcher is bad, but taking a good college pitcher over a good HS pitcher is a toss-up. I used WHIP in that original post, and I think that is as good a metric of quality as the next, and the numbers suggest that the HS flame-out rate offsets the upside.

It is a great discussion point though, and the right numbers could convince me that the HS pick is clearly better – i just have yet to see those numbers…..

by cdb on May 28, 2008 6:12 PM EDT 0 recs

if you measure success by just having a guy

make it to the show, then college players are a better bet. I would like to aim a little higher than just having guys make it to the show. I don’t know enough to evaluate the value of WHIP vs. ERA+, but in the first round I want guys who are going to be top of the rotation guys, not middle relievers.

Nevertheless, I think your method is good as well. As always, my primary interest is to promote discussion.

Those Pilgrims ain't lookin' so proud now...

by giveml on May 28, 2008 7:21 PM EDT up 0 recs

agree

about ‘making it to the show’ – making it to the ML is not enough to be considered a success. However, you made the conclusion that HS are not less risky than College P. Making it to the show is a good measure of risk. Draftees that never make it to the ML have zero chance of being considered a success, by any measure.

by cdb on May 29, 2008 10:09 AM EDT up 0 recs

I agree

but bear in mind that I am only looking at the first round. I can’t find any evidence that HS pitchers drafted in the first round are less likely to make it. In a recent five-year sample of first round picks the college pitchers were the ones less likely to make it. In a sample of pitchers with over 1000 IPs at the MLB level the ones with 110+ ERA+ were about twice as likely to be HS draftees as college draftees.

My whole emphasis has been on let’s figure out how to draft top drawer pitchers, not the stockpile of RH middle relievers we have historically come up with. Consider that our best starter right now (Wainwright) was a high school pick, our best pitching prospect (Garcia) was a high school pick (in the 22nd round!!), Pineiro and Lohse were also high school picks. The lone 1st round college pick in our rotation is Braden Looper.

I am not biased in favor of HS pitchers, but I think the notion that it is too risky to draft HS pitchers in the first round or two is somewhat irrational. Perhaps I have randomly chosen a couple of bad metrics to evaluate, but if somebody has data related to the first few rounds of the draft that show me HS pitchers are more risky I would be happy to see it.

More than half of the best pitchers out there are either amateur free agents or are drafted in the first two rounds. I just want to see us get our fair share of the best pitchers.

Those Pilgrims ain't lookin' so proud now...

by giveml on May 29, 2008 11:25 AM EDT up 0 recs

It would be very interesting to see

an analysis over a decent sample size correlating WHIP and ERA+. I think it is beyond my ability to gather and manipulate the necessary data, but I am willing to contribute.

I started evaluating this question because I believed what I read in Moneyball about the risks of HS pitchers. I still think a view towards quality will paint the HS pitchers in a more favorable light.

Those Pilgrims ain't lookin' so proud now...

by giveml on May 28, 2008 8:40 PM EDT up 0 recs

yes

I agree again. It would be intersting to compare. My only concern with ERA+ is that it is an ERA based measure. Corrected, but still ERA based.

The more I think about this, the more we may be looking at sample size issues. I used a huge dataset that looked at all pitchers drafted, while you are looking at a more select group which has lower statistical power, but may be more relevent to the question you propose – ‘who to draft at #13?’ Not going to claim to be right, or that you are wrong with your method, but I do think that your blanket statement that HS draftees are no more risky than college pitchers is not supported by the data you present.

by cdb on May 29, 2008 10:15 AM EDT up 0 recs

Your right

my statement was a little too “blankety”. I was referring to first round picks, but didn’t expressly state that.

Those Pilgrims ain't lookin' so proud now...

by giveml on May 29, 2008 11:27 AM EDT up 0 recs

ERA+ vs WHIP

I collected some data from baseball reference.com for the 2007 pitchers for our favorite division – the NL Central. I used a cutoff of 20 innings for the year, which is a little liberal, but demonstrates the point I think, that WHIP and ERA+ are generally in agreement: Those pitchers that give up alot of hits/walks/HBP per inning tend to have a worse (lower) ERA+. However, the relationship isn’t linear. There is a distinct curve to the line, as very few pitchers had a WHIP below 1, essentially limiting the distribution.

I tried to link to an image I posted – we will see if it worked.

by cdb on May 29, 2008 7:42 PM EDT up 0 recs

did not work!!!

follow this link instead:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22503078@N04/2535230242/

If I limit the figure to only pitchers with 100 or more innings, you get this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22503078@N04/2534432453/

A more linear distribution, but a small dataset.

Notice also, that the r2 value is only between 0.56 and 0.75. This means that the line that we draw accounts for between 50 and 75% of the variation – not bad but that leaves 25-50% of the variation between them to something else.

by cdb on May 29, 2008 7:51 PM EDT up 1 recs

FIP

just out of curiosity, I calculated FIP using THT’s formula and plotted that against ERA+ and WHIP. Looks about the same. They are all highly correlated, but there is still a good deal of scatter around the line:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22503078@N04/2534453809/

by cdb on May 29, 2008 8:05 PM EDT up 1 recs

Quibble / Suggestion

I had an objection that your methodology biases against college players as a class, since (I’d reason) low-round HS picks would be unlikely to sign, since they could go onto college and up their draft status while low-round college pitchers would have more incentive to get their pro careers started. So I ran a script that looked at rounds 20-50 of the 2007 draft and counted the numbers of players born in 1986 or earlier and the percentage of them that signed vs the number of players born in 1987 or later and the percentage who signed. The 1986 cutoff was kind of arbitrary, but it would be presumably high school/juco kids and college sophomores and freshmen who had significant leverage yet.

It turns out that this doesn’t really address my objection to your study, if I still object to it. But it took a small amount of work and the results are pretty stark, so I’ll deem them worthy of posting.

Here’s the result:

463 players drafted who were born in 1986 or older and 288 signed: 0.622030237581
386 players drafted who were born in 1987 or younger and 61 signed: 0.158031088083

That means that 16% of players of less than drinking age who were drafted after the 19th round in 2007 agreed to sign, versus 62% of the group approximating college juniors and seniors.

I’ll rework the script next week to spit out any other cutoffs that would seem to be of interest, but I need to pack for vacation now.

by liam on May 28, 2008 6:33 PM EDT 0 recs

That was my thought too

most of the high school players getting signed are big money guys.

I still like the post, love the effort, and I don’t think HS vs. College is any less/more risky – but I think the reason HS pitchers seem more likely to make it to the majors is driven mostly by selection bias.

by enoscountry on May 28, 2008 6:53 PM EDT up 0 recs

What I was trying to get at

in that clumsy prose was that most of the roster-fill caliber draftees (the low rounders) come from the college ranks, so you’d expect to see a lot of washout college draftees or players that don’t rise to the higher levels. By giveml’s scoring metric, then, you’d expect college players to have a lower average score than high school players. I didn’t realize he’d cutoff at round 30, or I would’ve measured the right thing to make an argument against the methodology. Instead I just verified a reasonable assumption that players with an amateur career still ahead of them are unlikely to sign in the lower rounds.

I expect that holds true for rounds 15-30, and even 5-30, although less dramatically than for rounds 20-50.

by liam on May 28, 2008 7:10 PM EDT up 0 recs

clarification

I am only looking at the top thirty picks, not the top thirty rounds. I am not as handy as some of you guys at massaging data, so I have to ask more specific questions.

Those Pilgrims ain't lookin' so proud now...

by giveml on May 28, 2008 7:24 PM EDT up 0 recs

Ah, I misread you twice

Your result is pretty shocking, then.

by liam on May 28, 2008 7:27 PM EDT up 0 recs

shocking, how?

do you mean shocking, as in: “shocking that so many college pitchers, who were not drafted at a high level (or at all) as HS players ended up being as good as the highly-touted HS picks” or “shocking that so many HS picks who are at an earlier point in their development curve were successful in the bigs as quickly as supposedly more-developed college pitchers”?

in my mind, limiting the sample to the first round makes the whole exercise less than great, on balance. in other words, what we’re trying to find is whether the Cardinals should tend towards drafting HS or college pitchers, right? so, if that’s the research question, then whether or not a pitcher signs is very important. as is including all the picks, not just the can’t-miss guys like Cain, Kershaw, Lincecum, Miller, and Scherzer.

even better would be an analysis comparing the contracts signed to value-added (performance). in other words, on a dollar-for-dollar, do the highly-touted and well-paid HS picks add more win shares (or Vorp, or whatever) than their college counterparts. the HS players certainly have more leverage in contract negotiations, as do the non-senior college players.

in other words, this is a good start for a conversation. but it’s nothing more than a start. no conclusions can really be drawn. especially not a conclusion as bold as “it seems clear that the notion that HS pitchers are more risky than college pitchers is completely unfounded”. selection bias alone should discredit this conclusion, as many others have noted.

by kindred on May 30, 2008 12:52 AM EDT up 0 recs

god...

... i’ve got to stop posting after drinking all night. hopefully someone can make some sense out of that. basically, my concerns are:

1. selection bias, by limiting the sample to the first round.

2. selection bias, by not distinguishing b/t players who were drafted out of HS but chose to go to college.

3. selecting the wrong dependent variable. you admitted as such, when you said you were looking for top-flight pitchers only. but this leads me to point #4

4. suppose (for the sake of it) that Porcello ends up as a bust. will you factor in his $11mn contract into the calculus, as compared to Mortensen’s much more modest deal? if not, then you’re not truly comparing value-added to the club, which is what the draft is all about. basically, if Porcello ends up being anything other than an ace, then he wasn’t worth it. but Mortensen can end up as a #3 or #4 pitcher and be a strong pick.

other things as well, but i’m tired. so that’s all for now. again, a great post as a conversation starter. but i think this is barely the beginning, and not nearly the end, of the conversation.

by kindred on May 30, 2008 1:02 AM EDT up 0 recs

I remember drinking all night

and I think your post was pretty lucid, sober or not. Just to be clear, all I ever wanted to do was promote discussion.

I first started looking into this subject because I had read a lot of the conventional wisdom about college pitchers being much safer picks and I was looking to support that point of view. Last winter, I thought a good place to start looking was at the established pool of quality MLB starting pitchers as that is what most teams are looking for when they draft a pitcher early.

Echoing Liam’s sentiment, I was pretty shocked when I found that a preponderance of the top active starters had been high school picks and less than a quarter had been college picks. I am not a scientist or a mathematician/statistician, but I think that is pretty compelling information. It certainly is enough to reconsider the organizational bias towards drafting college pitchers early. It may be possible that Adam Ottavino will be a better pitcher than Chad Billingsley or that Chris Lambert will outperform Jeremy Bonderman, but it doesn’t look like a good wager at this point.

As we got closer to the draft and there was increased interest in who the actual 13th pick would be, I thought it would make sense to look at the same question from a different angle. After all, many of the pitchers in the previous study were drafted/signed over a decade ago. It seemed it would be a good idea to look at recent drafts to see if there had been a substantial change.

Limited sample or not, I think looking at the track records of younger pitchers who were high draft picks further supports the premise that a bias toward drafting college pitchers early would appear to be a flawed strategy if your goal is to actually acquire superior MLB pitchers in the first rounds.

I would love to see a sweeping tour de force that more thoroughly answers the question, but I don’t see how you could look at the data presented and not think it fairly significant. As i posted earlier in this thread, I may have not been clear in my conclusion that I was referring to the relative risk of taking HS pitchers in the early rounds, not in the entire draft.

Those Pilgrims ain't lookin' so proud now...

by giveml on May 30, 2008 9:42 AM EDT up 0 recs

I wonder just how "we'll take the best player available" we are

The way this stupid slot system is set up, teams themselves can manipulate the draft if you’re willing to spend the $$$. I wonder if they really like a guy like Crow or Matusz or Alvarez, they could let that guy know to ask for big dollars so as he pulls a “Boras fall” right into their laps. Of course that also means they’d have to pony up as well but trading 3-4 million and a B+ prospect for an A prospect like Alvarez seems like a pretty good deal to me…we’ve already got the All-Star game what are they going to do about it? The only team in front of them known to bust slot is the Rangers. Slot for #13 last year looks like it was about 1.6-1.7, say you propose Alvarez a Porcello type deal wouldn’t that be worth it?

"Regression to the mean is so much more fun to watch when it’s a Cub who is regressing." SleepyCA

by joker24 on May 28, 2008 9:49 PM EDT 0 recs

I was listening to an interview with Keith Law ...

(not one of my favorite people, but …) he was saying that the conventional wisdom is that the slot system may fall completely apart this year. The system has always been a gentleman’s agreement, and few teams are seeing the benefit as teams such as Boston and Detroit are cherry-picking talent by breaking the agreement. He also said the guy that was in charge of enforcing that system is now a member of the Pirates’ management.

It will be interesting to see if he is correct. Will more teams decide buck the system? More importantly, will the Cardinals decide to go around the system?

by etp_stl on Jun 1, 2008 9:22 AM EDT up 0 recs

beautiful post.

is there anyway to do the same for international and amateur pitchers? Reading the releases of the front office, it sounds like they anticipate a lot of recruits from abroad.

by tom s. on May 28, 2008 11:26 PM EDT 0 recs

In the earlier post that was linked

I found that 21% of the pitchers with ERA+ over 110 with over 1000 MLB IPs were amateur free agents (AFAs), 24% were college picks, and 55% were high school picks. I don’t have any idea what the respective pool sizes were. In other words I don’t know how many AFAs were signed to come up with the superior pitchers.

Those Pilgrims ain't lookin' so proud now...

by giveml on May 29, 2008 11:31 AM EDT up 0 recs

just for fun

i decided to take a look at all the college pitchers drafted by the cardinals in the first two rounds over the past twenty years and see what would have happened if the cardinals had taken the next high school pitcher in the draft. then i decided i might as well see what would have happened if they had taken the next college pitcher in the draft as well.

the theory was to see if the problem was drafting so many college pitchers or just drafting the wrong college pitchers. what i found surprised me quite a bit as i was under the impression the cardinals had mostly underperformed the rest of the league on their early college picks.

i didn’t do an exhaustive survey of all the players to verify exactly who might have been in the big leagues, but i did check quite a few of them. here is the list of cardinal college pitchers drafted in the first two rounds since 1988 that have made it to the big leagues:

Chris Perez
Dan Haren
Chad Hutchinson
Braden Looper
Matt Morris
Alan Benes
Sean Lowe
Allen Watson
Donovan Osborne

for a total of nine pitchers out of 30 picks. there are still quite a few who have at least some chance of seeing the big leagues including Mortensen, Kopp, Todd, Ottavino, Furnish, McCormick, and Webber. not that i am predicting any or all of these guys will make it, but they are all still in the system. i suppose Chris Lambert still has a chance too.

if the cardinals had taken the next high school pitcher selected instead of the player they actually chose, they would have ended up with the following major leaguers:

Adam Wainwright
Casey Daigle
Jerome Williams
Doug Waechter
John Patterson
Jeff D’Amico
Todd van Poppel
Alex Fernandez
Arthur Rhodes
Darren Oliver

for a total of ten. i think it is pretty debatable which list is better, but I think Adam Wainwright has a chance to really tip the balance if he continues to stay healthy and develop. if we had already had Wainer in our system i wonder what we could have gotten for Drew and Marrero? i don’t know about the recent picks, say from 2004 on up (the cards didn’t pick any college pitchers during the first two rounds in 2002 or 2003), but one interesting name that popped up was Cory Rasmus. i don’t really know anything about him as a pitcher, but it is a curiosity. if anyone knows anything about Neil Ramirez, Scott Moriel, Michael Watt, Steven Evarts, Brett Anderson, Sean West, William Inman, or Steven Waldrop feel free to chime in.

if the birds had taken the next college pitcher instead of the one they chose the list would look like this:

Garrett Olson
Glen Perkins
Noah Lowry
Jon Rauch
Billy Koch
Mark Redman
Scott Sullivan
Aaron Sele

for a total of eight. i am pretty sure I would take the cardinals overall pool, but Noah Lowry would look pretty good in the BOB and Garrett Olson looks to have some potential. again, i don’t know much about the recent picks from this list, but they are: Brett Cecil, Barry Enright, Brant Rustich, Brooks Brown, Joshua Butler, Steven Wright, and Jason Neighborgall.

i know this isn’t really a statistically interesting look and you can’t really draw much of a conclusion from it. it does give me a better understanding of just how much of a crapshoot the draft can be and makes me more excited about the cardinals recent sucesses in the draft. it also makes their historical performance look a lot better to me.

Those Pilgrims ain't lookin' so proud now...

by giveml on May 31, 2008 12:44 AM EDT 0 recs

Does Wainwright really tip the scales?

You have Haren in the other pool, so isn’t that kind of a wash between those two? Morris was clearly a top of the rotation guy before injuries and Kile’s death hit him, so that is two top of the rotation guys out of their college list.

It looks like it is fairly even with:

Wainwright – Haren
Fernandez – Morris
Patterson – Osbourne
Rhodes – Looper
D’Amico – Lowe
Oliver – Watson

These guys were pretty even in career paths. You could probably quibble over who was better or worse, but they seem pretty even between the results. If Benes doesn’t get hurt, if Perez develops into a real closer, well …

by etp_stl on Jun 1, 2008 9:44 AM EDT up 0 recs

no argument

my thinking is that Wainwright may develop into a better pitcher than Haren now that Haren doesn’t pitch in one of the top pitchers parks in MLB. It is probably a stretch to rate Watson as equivalent to Oliver as I would rather have 1576 innings, 96 wins, and a 97 OPS+ than 892 innings, 51 wins, and an 86 ERA+. Also, in the barely relevant category, Doug Waechter has had a pretty forgettable career so far, but is still young and doing well for the Marlins this year. It would be a difficult to argue that either list is clearly better. Utilimately, it will probably come down to the guys who are still on their way up. If that is the case then I hope the Cardinals are clear winners!

I really wish Alan Benes could have stayed healthy. I really felt TLR/Duncan rode him way too hard early in his career. Maybe he was going to break down anyway….I just thought he was going to have a long, successful career.

Those Pilgrims ain't lookin' so proud now...

by giveml on Jun 1, 2008 7:20 PM EDT up 0 recs

Couple of things

Noah Lowry would look pretty good in the BOB

Not really at this point. BB=K in 2007 and he went all Ankiel in Spring though he had some nerve thing from which he still can’t come back.

Jason Neighborgall

Neighborgall doesn’t really count as a true college pitcher. Top prospect out of HS who went to G-Tech, basically turned into a right-handed Ankiel with outrageous walk rates and tons of wild pitches….except he was like Zumaya as a starter with the fastball sitting 97-100 but then he had an “80” curve. I just wouldn’t want to face him literally it just wouldn’t have been fun. Anyway, he was brutal in college and got drafted that high off of that stuff, not the college polish…

"Regression to the mean is so much more fun to watch when it’s a Cub who is regressing." SleepyCA

by joker24 on May 31, 2008 2:10 AM EDT 0 recs