Draft Picks Study

[Huckleberry]

Based on some of the pitching flameout discussion over the seasons here in the WBA I decided to put some numbers together and make some pretty charts. We don't really have a huge history so sample size concerns apply, but here is the data. All of the below charts include both ABL and IBL picks and career stats, so it treats the WBA as a whole.

I took every player who is currently marked as a pitcher and then created a table with their draft round and their career pWAR. I then calculated the sum of pWAR by round drafted and also the averages. After doing that, I followed up by throwing out both the high and the low for each draft round and getting those sums and means as well.





Lesson learned - it's not as bad as it seems intuitively. We are still getting far more production out of higher draft picks and there is generally a smooth curve on the way down the draft. The means chart really shows that there have been some outliers later in the draft but that's the way it should be, I'd think. We all want a diamond in the rough and the tradeoff for those is busts. I was actually very glad to see these results because I was thinking of abandoning pitchers in the early rounds altogether. Based on the above, that still does not seem like a good plan.

Next I will do bWAR or overall WAR for position players. Probably overall WAR.

[Huckleberry]

Oh yeah, one more thing. This ignores the inaugural draft and only covers players selected in the annual drafts.

[Huckleberry]

[Huckleberry]

Final disclaimer, this is based on the current CSV files. I have it set to delete players who retire without reaching the majors, so some of the averages will be inflated as they don't include those players in the denominator.

[Bob_Meteors]

So I think I should trade my 5th round pick for a 6th round pick, right? The numbers say so.

[Huckleberry]

Unfortunately the rules say we can't trade 6th round picks, but I'd be more than happy to take whoever you draft in the 5th round off your hands for $1. 

[CaseyBlakeDeWitt]

As long as we've got dealing picks up for discussion, why is it that we don't allow moving picks that come after the fifth round?

[Huckleberry]

Mostly it limits the amount of tracking I have to do, please a little bit regarding the value of later picks not really warranting being traded. Although Bob apparently already has a plan. Ha.

[Coop]

I decided to do a draft study of my own, from a different angle.  My study is very different from Huck's because (a) I studied only pitchers from rounds 1-2, and (b) I only have access to the IBL's draft history, not the ABL's, so my study was limited to the IBL draft classes.  (I'd be happy to study the ABL draft classes too if I could be given a list of those players.)

I decided to find all pitchers drafted in rounds 1 and 2 from the 2101 through 2106 rookie drafts.  (Actually I was originally going to include draftees from 2107 but I found that almost all of them are still in the minors, and that it's too soon to evaluate them, so I dropped them out of the study.)

I ran into one snag --- for some reason the draft history for the IBL in 2102 is missing from the WBA website.  So my study actually only covered a total of 5 rookie drafts, the drafts of 2101, 2103, 2104, 2105 and 2106.

In these 5 drafts I found a total of 37 pitchers who were drafted in rounds 1 and 2.  I then reviewed all of those pitchers and assigned each guy to one of the following categories:

SUCCESS.  The player became a reasonably successful big-league pitcher.

DISAPPOINTMENT.  The player made it to the majors but was nowhere near as good as had been expected.

FLAMEOUT.  The player's ratings dropped precipitously and he never made it to the majors, or if he did, it was a brief, unsuccessful cameo.

UNKNOWN.  It's still too early to tell how this guy's career is going to go.

Granted, placing the pitchers into one of the above categories required a certain amount of subjectivity, but at the end of this post I'll list the pitchers and the categories where I placed them, and I think in most cases you'll find if you review them that it's pretty clear where each pitcher belongs.

So, what were my final numbers?  Well, they weren't pretty.  Of the 37 pitchers in my study ...

14 pitchers were Successes.
11 pitchers were Disappointments.
 9 pitchers were Flameouts.
 3 pitchers are still Unknowns.

Throwing out the 3 Unknowns, we have 34 pitchers, of whom only 14 became successful big-league pitchers.  That's 41 percent.

So my study indicates that if you draft a pitcher in the first two rounds, there's only a 41 percent chance that he'll become a successful big-leaguer (and a 59 percent chance that he won't).  Not real encouraging, I know, but that's what I found.

Here's the list of the pitchers in my study, grouped by the category in which I placed them.

Successes:
Moriz Ishemgujin (drafted by London, round 2, 2101)
J. Surendranath (drafted by Seoul, round 1, 2103)
Cirayu Rasiah (drafted by Seoul, round 2, 2103)
Shan-bo Liao (drafted by Seoul, round 1, 2104)
Workneh Mtundu (drafted by London, round 1, 2104)
Kuan Kuo (drafted by Karachi, round 1, 2104)
Munsif Esam (drafted by Black Forest, round 1, 2104)
Hamzah Walliyullah (drafted by Seoul, round 2, 2104)
El-Fatih Mwendapole (drafted by Karachi, round 1, 2105)
Zhong-xian Wang (drafted by London, round 1, 2105)
Yami Salehe (drafted by Melbourne, round 1, 2105)
Bhuvanesh Chandak (drafted by Karachi, round 2, 2105)
Ming Song (drafted by Rome, round 1, 2106)
Banesvara Ranjan (drafted by Karachi, round 1, 2106)

Disappointments:
Abhramu Manyam (drafted by Paris, round 1, 2101)
Kuang-an Hsiao (drafted by Barcelona, round 1, 2101)
Yerik Ekimecky (drafted by Rome, round 1, 2101)
Du-yang Kung (drafted by Mumbai, round 1, 2101)
Mahmood Jaspal (drafted by Singapore, round 1, 2101)
Justino Boselli (drafted by Seoul, round 2, 2101)
Davida Keikikalani (drafted by London, round 2, 2104)
Saribek Hayrumian (drafted by Melbourne, round 2, 2104)
Tan-ming Peng (drafted by Seoul, round 1, 2105)
Yin-fat Chan (drafted by Mumbai, round 1, 2105)
Baz bin Wakil (drafted by Black Forest, round 2, 2105)

Flameouts:
Seyoum Saber (drafted by Barcelona, round 2, 2101)
Huang Liu (drafted by Singapore, round 1, 2103)
Ji-an Fang (drafted by Karachi, round 2, 2103)
Mori Luwandi (drafted by Barcelona, round 1, 2104)
Ming Kao (drafted by Mumbai, round 2, 2104)
Thao Duong (drafted by Mumbai, round 2, 2105)
Zhong-xian Liu (drafted by Rome, round 2, 2106)
Mohankumar Manasa (drafted by Black Forest, round 2, 2106)
Ras Sukhjinder (drafted by Mumbai, round 2, 2106)

Unknowns (too soon to evaluate them):
Kvana Datar (drafted by Melbourne, round 1, 2104)
Astika Saraswathi (drafted by London, round 2, 2105)
Kusumoda Swathi (drafted by Seoul, round 2, 2106)

[Claybor]

I like this study, but I have some thoughts on London players above;

Moriz Ishemgujin - I'd hesitate to call him a success. He has successfully gotten worse after 2 pretty good years though. He was released from a pretty bad pitching staff at the age of 28 and has returned with another team that probably wishes he had not done so at this point.

Zhong-xian Wang-  He's pitched 90 innings of major league ball. Has a bit of a ways to go to be considered a success. He actually looks a lot like another guy on your list in the disappointment category Du-yang Kung, who was acquired by London and now sits in AAA. Hopefully Wang follows a different path.

[Coop]

I agree.  I was pretty generous in my definition of success.  Basically, I was so shocked by how many guys were turning into busts that I interpreted even a small amount of big-league competence as success.  Maybe I should have been more strict.  Anyway, that only reinforces the overall finding, that the attrition rate among young pitchers is very high.

[Claybor]

Ahhh, you were being generous.  Still a cool study regardless.

I like it when anyone throws out some food for thought. This league has one hell of a core of GM's that are really into this league, I wish we could nail down a few of the fringe teams for good too.

[Coop]

I decided to go back and review the "Successes" on my list, with an eye toward being less generous and a little more demanding.  I decided that, if I had it to do over again, I'd move Ishemgujin and Mwendapole to the Disappointments list.  I'd move Wang and Song to the "Unknowns - too young" category, and I'm really on the fence about Surendranath, Salehe and Ranjan.  If you leave those 3 guys as Successes, the final tally is 10 Successes, 13 Disappointments, 9 Flameouts and 5 Unknowns, which means that the Success rate becomes 31 percent (10 of 32).  If you move Surendranath, Salehe and Ranjan to the Disappointments list, the tally is 7 Successes, 16 Disappointments, 9 Flameouts and 5 Unknowns, lowering the Success rate to 22 percent (7 of 32).

I don't know about anybody else, but I'm a little depressed to think that, when you draft a pitcher in one of the first two rounds, the chances of him becoming a successful big-league pitcher are less than 1 in 3, maybe even less than 1 in 4.  But it's not like you may as well wait until the later rounds to select a pitcher.  Huck's study shows that players get less productive (significantly so) every round.  Simply put, if you want a pitcher, the best you can do is to draft one in the first two rounds and cross your fingers.  Most of them just don't make it.

[APMP]

I decided to go back and review the "Successes" on my list, with an eye toward being less generous and a little more demanding.  I decided that, if I had it to do over again, I'd move Ishemgujin and Mwendapole to the Disappointments list.  I'd move Wang and Song to the "Unknowns - too young" category, and I'm really on the fence about Surendranath, Salehe and Ranjan.  If you leave those 3 guys as Successes, the final tally is 10 Successes, 13 Disappointments, 9 Flameouts and 5 Unknowns, which means that the Success rate becomes 31 percent (10 of 32).  If you move Surendranath, Salehe and Ranjan to the Disappointments list, the tally is 7 Successes, 16 Disappointments, 9 Flameouts and 5 Unknowns, lowering the Success rate to 22 percent (7 of 32).

I don't know about anybody else, but I'm a little depressed to think that, when you draft a pitcher in one of the first two rounds, the chances of him becoming a successful big-league pitcher are less than 1 in 3, maybe even less than 1 in 4.  But it's not like you may as well wait until the later rounds to select a pitcher.  Huck's study shows that players get less productive (significantly so) every round.  Simply put, if you want a pitcher, the best you can do is to draft one in the first two rounds and cross your fingers.  Most of them just don't make it.

Wonder if anybody's done a similar study for MLB

[Bob_Meteors]

You know, I really do think picks from later rounds should be able to be traded. If you think about it, a 6th-round pick in a ten person league is basically a late second round pick in the MLB. I know the WBA is different, but maybe we should consider expanding it a little, just to 6th and 7th or something.