As you all know - we need pitching, and quality pitching is expensive to buy.  The ability to draft quality pitching can make or break teams that can't afford to (or just will not, out of principle) buy the highest quality free agents.  I realize that this is probably not the best time to be discussing the draft, but we constantly come back to the `high risk/high reward' vs `safe pick' discussions, whether it is in reference to signing free agents, drafting amateurs, or trade proposals.  And with the recent front pages summarizing the Cardinals farm system (courtesy of Red Baron), I decided that I really wanted to know more about the various draft strategies, in particular as those strategies apply to pitching.  So I started with one main question:  how do high school draftees fare as compared to college draftees?  I actually asked the community this question a long time ago buried deeply in some other thread, but received no answers.  I haven't found an answer online anywhere (though I may just be looking in the wrong places), so decided to try to answer it myself.  

To try to answer this question, I downloaded draft datasheets on all players drafted as pitchers between the years 1999 and 2006 (data from www.baseball-reference.com ).  I chose the years based on the assumption that players drafted in 1999, if they are going to get major league experience at all, should have done so by the 2007 season. There may be a few stragglers that are called up after 9 or more years in the minors, but these should be relatively few. This datasheet contains the draft positions for all players, along with the school they were drafted from, and some career stats, including ERA, WHIP, and OPS.  Rather than search for stats on all 6202 pitchers drafted in that time, I used the stats provided.  

I used the WHIP statistic first as a surrogate for MLB experience.  If they have a WHIP, they have major league experience.  I also was able to use the school that players were drafted from to determine high school (HS) vs college (Col) draftees.  So let's look first at the percentage of draftees that make it to the majors, comparing HS to Col draftees.  

Year    HS(%)    Col(%)
1999    8.2    14.3
2000    10.5    11.1
2001    6.5    9.5
2002    6.5    10.4
2003    3.2    7.5
2004    1.7    4.4
2005    0    2.3
2006    0    0.9

This confirms what many here have known to be true:  HS pitchers take longer to reach the major leagues and have a lower likelihood of making it to the majors at all.  Further, only 11.8% of pitchers drafted in 1999 have ever pitched at the major league level.  I should note here that a few players drafted as pitchers have converted to position players (such as Brad Hawpe of the Rockies), and therefore probably should not be considered as `failures'.  

However, making it to the majors is one thing - succeeding at that level is something quite different.  And this is really the question that I had - it is often implied that HS draftees have a higher `upside'.  So the question is this: do HS draftees that make it actually perform better than Col draftees?  To look at success, I used WHIP (may not be ideal, but I wasn't going to try to find more appropriate stats for 6000+ pitchers - and it should be noted that we are dealing with the league as a whole, so team defense or park effects should be relatively standardized, making defense-dependent stats more trustworthy).   So how does the average (mean) Col pitcher fare against HS (note: using the median gave similar results)?

Year    HS    Col
1999    1.538    1.681
2000    1.571    1.688
2001    1.696    1.687
2002    1.730    1.594
2003    1.523    1.497
2004    1.443    1.482
2005      - -     1.589
2006      - -    1.224

What does this tell us?  First of all, college pitchers that make it to the majors very quickly are good (low WHIP).  Second, good HS pitchers take longer, but after about three years, the good ones start to make it, but they don't perform as well as the first year college pitchers (comparing 2004 HS to 2006 Col).  Third, WHIPs for college pitchers generally rise the longer we get from the draft year.  I interpret this to mean that the minor league journeymen are slowly being called up, and that the reason that they were in the minor leagues for seven years is that they aren't very good.  On the contrary, the HS draftees show a slight decreased for the 1999 and 2000 draft years.  Maybe this reflects the `high upside' that we always reference.  Those HS draftees can take a long time, but the potential to figure it out and succeed in the bigs doesn't go away.  So if you are looking for pitchers quickly (1-2 year - 2005,6 data), it might be advisable to draft a quality college pitcher (such as everyone's favorite trade target, Tim Lincecum or Ian Kennedy or Joba Chamberlain - all 2006 college draftees).  Even after six years, the difference in WHIP between Col and HS draftees (years 2001-2004) is minimal.  The upside, on average, doesn't appear until years 7-8 (1999 and 2000 drafts).  

To come back to the original question, do HS pitchers outperform Col pitchers?  I think that to answer that, one has to look at both the rate that the draftee makes it to the majors (MLB%) AND the stats (WHIP, in this case).  Let us look just at the years 1999 and 2000 - draft years in which most of the draftees will have pitched in the majors if they ever will.  

Draft    MLB(%)    WHIP   
HS     9.15        1.556
Col    12.62        1.684

So if you are drafting 8 years into the future, a HS pitcher is less likely to ever make it to the majors than a college pitcher, but those that do tend to be slightly better pitchers.  This does seem to confirm the `high risk: high reward' approach does what it purports to do: a typical HS draftee is less likely to ever see the majors, but more likely to succeed if they do make it. But the high reward only comes to the very patient - 7-8 years after the draft year.

With that being said - should the cardinals, with a relatively low quality farm system, be drafting HS or Col pitchers?  Probably the answer lies somewhere in between.  Col pitcher can fill out the ranks faster than HS, but over the long term, HS can be slightly better on average. Is the slight difference in WHIP worth the decreased likelihood of making it to the big leagues?  I don't know;  makes for a nice debate topic though.