Analyzing the MLB draft

There has been plenty of work published regarding the value of draft picks, most notably the work done by Victor Wang. Wang's previous studies (part 1 and part 2) on the draft were a major help for me in conducting this study.

Using the first 100 picks from the 1992-1999 drafts I came up with a sample of 388 players who reached the major leagues. Due to such a small sample size I disregarded Junior College and Community College draftees. I used Wins Above Replacement as my benchmark for evaluating players which differs from Wang's used of WAB (thanks to Sean Smith of baseballprojection.com for the WAR database). I took the average of each player's WAR over their first six seasons.

Much like Wang's study I broke the data down into first round picks (1-30), second round (31-70), and third round selection (71-100). I have broken down the data various ways below.

First Round

College hitters-- 1.336 WAR/year

High School hitters-- 1.204 WAR/year

College pitchers-- .649 WAR/year

High School pitchers-- .878 WAR/year

As previously noted college hitters hold the edge in terms of production, although high school batters are not far behind. One thing I found surprising is that my study shows that high school pitchers have actually outperformed college pitchers. This differs from all other previous draft study. This could be a result of a sample bias or a flaw in my methodology. I found the standard deviations for college pitchers (1.049) to be slightly than the SD for high school pitchers (1.261) in this round. This can be attributed to the unpredictability in developing young and inexperienced arms.

Second Round

College hitters-- .773 WAR/year

High School hitters-- .672 WAR/year

College pitchers-- .087 WAR/year

High School pitchers-- .084 WAR/year

Here we see a noticeable drop of in pitcher's WAR/year for both college and high school players. College hitters are still the most productive in this group. The SDs for pitchers in this round were much lower (.617 for college and .497 for HS).

Third Round

College hitters-- .115 WAR/year

High School hitters-- .424 WAR/year

College hitters-- (.023) WAR/year

High School pitchers-- .058 WAR/year

In this round we see high school batters hold the edge. College pitchers actually had a negative WAR in this range. College pitchers reported a SD of .469 while HS pitchers had .506.

We can see clearly that hitters are the safest picks, particularly college batters within the first two rounds. Victor Wang noted that he felt the best strategy would be to draft hitters early and then stock up on pitchers. My analysis leads me to believe that drafting pitchers in the first round is a pretty good strategy. Pitchers drafted in the first round are far more likely to be productive during their first six seasons.

I broke the first round selections down further based on picks:

1-10-- 1.417 WAR/year

11-20-- 1.115 WAR/year

21-30-- .353 WAR/year

There is a drastic drop in performance between picks 11-20 and 21-30. The difference between the top 10 and 11-20 is not nearly as large.

Here is the WAR/year broken down by position. I only used the positions listed in the Baseball-Reference draft database although most players surely switched positions. I also did not include two-way players Brooks Kieschnick and Rick Ankiel. For ease I combined first baseman and third baseman into a group of corner infielders and second baseman and shortstop into middle infielders. In parenthesis are the number of players in each position and I've included the standard deviations as well.

outfielders (64)-- .977 WAR/year 1.369 SD

middle infielders (48)-- .561 WAR/year 1.609 SD

corner infielders (41)-- 1.046 WAR/year 1.894 SD

catchers (29)-- .829 WAR/year 1.107 SD

right-handed pitchers (151)-- .314 WAR/year .863 SD

left-handed pitchers (55)-- .404 WAR/year 1.039 SD

I think the most interesting note from this is that lefties outperformed righties. This could obviously be due to the fact that there are far fewer lefties than righties which makes them that much more valuable to a team and there is also greater variation among southpaws.