Sabean must go!!

Please give me the examples of the good jobs done by teams in the back of the first round. The Braves have not done that well when they pick in the 21-30 pick overall range, despite your assertion:

1992: Jamie Arnold (21st)
1994: Jacob Shumate (27th)
1995: Chad Hutchinson (26th)
1996: A.J. Zapp (27th)
1997: Troy Cameron (29th)
2000: Scott Thorman (30th)
2001: Josh Burrus (29th)
2002: Jeff Francoeur (23rd)
2005: Joey Devine (27th)
2006: John Johnson (24th)

10 picks, one good player in Francoeur, and I think it is debatable whether he is good or not, his OPS+ is only 99, and good to great defense don’t make up for that, in my mind.

Look, you like to complain to me about this all the time but you haven’t looked at the draft picks; I have. So please, give me an example of a team drafting in the back of the first round who have done well.

I believe you are the ignorant one, I have gone through 100 picks over an 18 years period, so I have a pretty good feel for who has been good and when. But I will acknowledge my humanness that perhaps I missed some team. Please illuminate me.

I acknowledge that this is about people and “they’re real people with varying abilities to do their jobs well”. And I acknowledge that statistics does not apply strictly to something as human as this.

However, will you then acknowledge that in nature, there are certain percentages of physical traits, whether left-handedness, or any other physical traits you want to bring up. Sure, it depends on nationality and other factors, such as birth rate and such, including environmental, but over time you can get a sense for how much of a physical trait, whether it’s hitting a 3-pointer or hitting a curve ball over the fence, exists within a population.

So, yes, I know my 10% finding might not hold over time, but it gives a pretty good sense of what a team is dealing with when they are picking late in the first round.

One of my main points, and perhaps that is my fault for not accentuating this point, because it seems that everyone seems to miss this point, is that actual failure is harder to view when the success rate is so low, it can take 5-10 drafts plus another 4-6 years before you have enough evidence from the draft that a GM or draft director is not even average. By then, most GM’s have been fired or moved on.

I only use the examples because there is not many examples in life where you are dealing with very low odds of success. I was trying to give a sense of the magnitude of what we are dealing with here. If I wanted to, plus had the time, I could have probably put together a good enough statistical discussion on to prove my point statistically, but I don’t think I would get many people understanding my point.

I understand your point about individuality. Hence why I would never say any particularly prospect picked in the back of the first round has a 10% chance of success, you need to look at what he has done previously, take in what the scouts say about him (via all the various sites like Baseball America).

But my study gives a good sense of the availability of talent late in the first round and how talent availability declines greatly as the draft proceeds. And given this talent availability, or lack thereof, I can project generally how a group of picks having those characteristics will turn out. It is not like I looked at one year of data, I compiled 18 years worth of data, plus been following it assiduously since then.

The Tucker pick is even more flawed when you consider it’s Michael Tucker that the Giants lost a draft pick for. He wasn’t even a league average outfielder and surely the Giants could have found someone in AAA, on the waiver wire, or basically for free that could have matched his numbers.

Even if you want to believe Martin’s “10% chance” that the prospect they would have drafted would have ever been good, it’s a chance you take when the player-type of Michael Tucker is freely available for next to nothing.

And you’re right Grant, a prospect shouldn’t be judged by MLB success but by perceived value on the market place.

But others have.

OK, I thought I had a brain fart, but I didn’t mention Tucker here. Whew!

OK, people seem to misunderstand my position on Tucker so I’ll try to lay it all out – plus I probably forgot to say something before (only human with limited time, no monkey on a keyboard here) so I’ll try to be extra careful here today.

First, to clear up any confusion, if I had a choice, I wouldn’t give up a pick either. I love picks, heck I buy a lottery ticket when it gets over $100M (somebody has to win it someday). But it’s not my money, not my choice to set the budget. Magowan set the overall budget, Sabean had to choose what to do with that money.

What I said is that Sabean did what he could with his remaining money available to him, he made a difficult business choice. If Magowan had allowed him to use the money they later allocated to Maddux in a failed attempt to sign him, then maybe he could have gotten a better OF. But as I had analyzed early in the season, for that off-season there was very little money left to get a free agent, so it was either get a bunch of players for a little money each or get a big kahuna like Vlad and fill in on the cheap otherwise. They decided to spend a little to fill a lot of needs.

So the choice here was, use $1M on a prospect who most probably (the 10% odds because you don’t know in the off-season who is available to you in the next draft, and as a group, about 10% had turned out to be a good starting player) will not be a long-term starter for you or to get a player who would have been a good platoon player (but unfortunately his platoon buddy Jeffrey Hammonds never answer the bell).

People forgot that Tucker took over when Carlos Beltran went on the DL and led the Royals on a nice winning streak, so it’s not like he’s wasn’t any good, he was just an average player, a nice complement to a good team.

They also assumed he would not do well in Pac Bell Park, but my analysis showed that he should perform near his career norms, which he did. He accomplished what he is, a slightly below league average hitter who could play all three OF positions. Today players like that get $4-6M per season, so we got him on the cheap.

Thus, in essence, we traded an unnamed prospect who 9 times out of 10 for the past 18 years or so did not turn out to be a good long-term starter for you, and in exchange, we got a league average player on the cheap.

To find a league average player from the draft, I am doing this roughly in my head and memory (and I haven’t seen my results in years), but I would guess that if you drafted from the back of the first round, it would take about 2-3 years to find such a useful player (as Tucker; I defined a useful player who played more than 6 seasons worth of games, meaning he made it to free agent status, but did not have good stats, which I think I defined as BA > .285 -TheBaseballCube, which had the only draft data at that time, only provided BA).

So losing that draft pick was not that big a deal, the odds of that player ever even being a major leaguer was already staggering, about 50-60% never makes the majors, another 15-20% never play 6 seasons, heck, most of them maybe played one or two seasons, and clearly are replacement level players or worse, not even league average. That was over a 13 year period from 1986 to 1998. So if you want to cry over losing a pick who most likely won’t amount to anything in the majors, that is your perogative, but I got better uses for my time.

Again, if my choice, I force the cheap owners to shell out $1M total to be able to draft and sign Tucker. But that’s not what happened. However, I am not angry over such a decision because he basically threw away a lottery ticket. Maybe it could have been a winner, but most likely not. It is called a calculated risk.

Now, I acknowledged back then that I could not spend the time to see what trade value the player had. And I would add here that throwing out Madison Bumgarner’s name here only confuses things for people because he is a #10 pick overall, a much greater chance of turning out to be someone good, about 2.5 times the chances versus a 21-30th pick overall, again, in a general sense. Bumgarner clearly looks pretty good based on his HS stats and now pro stats. Why not throw out more appropriate names like Dante Powell, Arturo McDowell, Ted Wood.

Now people like to trot out the trades for Nen and Livan as justification for this value of picks, but look at the stats for Fontenot and Bump, I’m amazed the Marlins took them in exchange, they had made it to AA but their stats were decidedly unexciting, now that I know sabermetrics. Low K/9, high BB/9, K/BB under 2.0, didn’t throw past the 5th inning regularly, the Marlins appeared willing to chuck the two just to be rid of the contracts and money involved.

So I ask you this. Given that lack of success making it to the majors and sticking, in general, for these picks, this means that these players fail somewhere along the way up the ladder of the farm system. In addition, other GMs are not totally stupid either (most of the time), and are aware that most draft picks don’t do well enough to make the majors. So where is this value?

It’s easy to see the trades where they do have value, but look at the vast humanity of first round picks who never did anything and was never traded away for value, pull up any first round in baseball-reference.com, see all the players names there that you never heard of.

So quantify that for me. Or give me a lot of good recent examples. There has to be a high probability of this happening if you are going to posit this as a theory, because otherwise a low probability would kill your theory, there would be very little value if there is a lot probably attached. Prove to me that they have value, just because some players were palmed off on another team doesn’t mean we will necessarily get value for any prospect we pick in the back of the first round.

Take the 1988 draft. The Dodgers drafted Bill Bene with the 5th pick. He never pitched in a major league game. You would think that the Dodgers would have prefered to trade him instead of ending up with nothing, particularly for a #5 pick overall.

The thing is, by the time you figure out that he’s not valuable, the other teams have already figured that out and won’t take him in trade.

This theory is based on self selection by noting trades where young prospects are traded and theorizing that therefore any pick has value as a trading chip: the reason the prospect was able to be traded was because there was some value that the other team saw based on his stats his first few years as a pro. By then the non-prospects have already been dropped from the system or dropped from the prospect scene, but you don’t remember those guys.

Let’s use the A’s as an example, since a lot of people here love Billy Beane (I like him too) and would love him to be the Giants GM. Tell me why he didn’t try to trade away his #22 pick Clifton Pennington from the 2005 draft and get someone useful?

They could have used the infusion of talent the last few years, Billy admitted this and used that as justification for letting go Haren and Swisher for the huge package of prospects. As noted, he’s a first round pick from the back of the first round in 2005 and according to your and others’ theory, such a player is a valuable trading chip. If he is so valuable, why didn’t an operator like Billy flip him by now and get someone useful?

Here’s what BP says about him this year: ”... he might have value as a utility man, but he just hasn’t hit enough to provide any evidence that he was worth the A’s first-round pick in 2005.”

You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as the saying goes. The A’s clearly have needed major league talent for the past couple of years now, if Pennington was so valuable a trading chip, wouldn’t you think Billy would have flipped him by now?

He was not able to because frankly, besides Pennington’s brief rookie league play in 2006, Pennington has shown no discernable ability, looking at his stats, that would attract another team to trade for him, other than high OBP, but unfortunately, he has no power and thus a very low OPS despite the high OBP.

But according to the theory, he’s a first round pick so therefore he has valuable that could be converted into something useful at the major league level. Why hasn’t Billy done that yet given his needs of the past couple of seasons if this is so?

Let’s examine the MoneyBall draft year of 2002. Billy did hit homers with Swisher and Blanton, but swung and missed on the next five guys, John McCurdy, Ben Fritz, Jeremy Brown, and Stephen Obenchain, before hitting again with Mark Teahen, though the book is still open on him, he’s an OK player but his stats look a lot like Michael Tucker’s, OPS+-wise and we know how this crowd feels about Michale Tucker types. I’ll admit that extends into the late 30’s picks, but the odds are roughly the same there as in the back of the first round. Why didn’t he trade all these guys for the talent at the major league level, it is not like Billy couldn’t have used more.

Or how about this example, since it is germane to our situation here with Tucker. He did use Teahen to trade for a half season of Dotel, which is what you all posit as a potential value derived from having such a prospect, and Dotel was frankly not that good for them, or at least as good as they were hoping, and they did not get a pick back for him when he went free agent.

So, in essence, he traded away a 39th pick overall for a half season of basically average pitching (111 ERA+), paid an extra $2M+ over the pick for this half season, and ended up with nothing.

Let’s see, Giants traded away a 29th pick overall for a full season of basically average hitting, paid maybe $250K extra over the bonus for the pick for this full season, and ended up with Kelvin Pichardo.

I’m not getting how that is better than what the Giants did…