2.) If they had waited 24 hours they could have had the pick and Tucker, unless you believe they couldn't have paid for both. Considering where the Giants have been picking, the draft should cost them around 3 million a year in bonuses. Does that come out of their salary budget?

3.) The farm system is the only source of cheap [<2 million] talent that is necessary to finish out a roster with a limited budget. While there are notable exception, most of the

4.) I believe that teams have to trust that their scouting departments will find the best players. Certainly, some organizations are better than others. As far as I am concerned, the Giants have been pretty good under Tidrow, when you take into account their preference for pitching.

5.) Clearly, the Giants are making a push in to win while Bonds is still playing. Even if they do draft a guy intending to trade him, they couldn't for a year after he signed.

6.) Star quality players are not available for trade/FA very often, so your best chance at getting one may be through the draft.

7.) I think it largely has to do with thvery risk averse nature of Sabean. He would rather go with consitency over potential in my opinion. This, in my opinion, is why Alfozo was acquired.

Jason Varitek    OF
Michael Barrett    SS
Jayson Werth    C

I really thought the point was going to be "players rarely play the position they were drafted at," particularly since I think Tucker was drafted as a shortstop. But the "why don't we waive Matheny and start Torcato at catcher" conclusion never came.

Beyond that, right or wrong, Sabean's stance hurts fans in that we don't get the opportunity to dream about our first round picks, even if that dream is short-lived. It's one of the joys of being a sports fan, and somehow a second round pick (even an intriguing one like EM-E) just isn't the same.

Giants fans don't get to spend a June afternoon saying things like "our offensive problems will be solved as soon as Tootie Myers arrives!" or "the Ntema Ndungidi era has begun!" or "hop on the Trzesniak Trzain, people!" We don't get to register the domain www.kelceymuckerisgod.com.

Sabean never takes the value of my daydreams into account when making these decisions...

% who played in the MLB: 50.8%
% with careers longer than 5 years: 28.6%
Avg time to reach majors: 3.71 years

It stands to reason that in a four year period, an average drafter in this range will get one good MLB player, one marginal MLB player, and two duds.  

This concludes the irrelevant comment of the day.

I also used Baseball Cube's data - gdog probably bought the data because they don't provide each players' batting stats for each draft pick easily on the website; I hand collected and catgorized everything - but only back to Sabean's first year as a draft coordinator - for the Yankees - in 1986.  However, I covered to 1998 because around 4-5 seasons after the draft, most good to star players have already broken out and I had data to 2003.  His data seems to bear that out, though his data includes all players and there were a lot of players who played less than 3 seasons worth of MLB games.

What I did was categorize each drafted player for the first 100 overall picks into 5 categories:  Star, Good, Useful(good enough to get arbitration), Marginal (basically 0.5-3 seasons), and, to be kind, the Rest.  

The problem with averages, which gdog used to illustrate his argument can be seen by this quote I got from some manager (quoted somewhere):  if your left hand is in boiling water and the right hand is in freezing water, the average temperature means that you should be comfortable.  You cannot look at the average and assume some certain rate of performance, as gdog did.  You need to actually categorize them and count them to develop the actual odds of picking for that selected time period.

You can read my whole article but for the picks in question here, picks 21-40, only 1.9% of picks from 21-60 were stars (I grouped picks by how similar their frequency of the particular category was), only 10.8% of picks from 21-30 and 4.0% of picks 31-90 were either a Star or Good player, and 32% of picks 21-30 and 22% of picks 31-50 were either a Star, Good, or Useful.

Using the expected odds of picking a star vs. the typical bonus for that pick range, most teams end up spending around $30M in draft bonuses to find a star player.  For one at least good player, you end up spending around $10-15M in draft bonuses.  And for one at least useful player, you end up spending around $5-7M.  And that doesn't include the salaries you eventually pay the player.

Taking Michael Tucker as an example, he is the classic useful player.  Would you rather buy a $1.5 million lottery ticket (i.e. pay your first round pick in the 21-30 range) in hopes that you'll get at least a good player (about 1 in 9 chance; a useful player can be signed easily) plus have to wait up to 5 years for him to breakout?

Or, would you rather spend it on a already proven useful player like Tucker? In total, it could be up to 5 seasons before you actually pick a Useful player, then another 5 to 10 years before he is actually performing like a useful player in the major leagues. Tucker contributed immediately.  

So if the choice is one or the other, this data suggests that you go for Tucker if you have that need right now.  And for that draft pick they gave up but could have had, the Giants odds of picking a good player is about 1 in 9 so the data suggests that they did not really lose much - at least in expected value of a good player - by giving up that pick.

And if you negotiate a third round pick for that spot, the odds for the 3rd round pick being a good player was between 1.5% and 4.0%, for being a useful player was around 13%.  Again, you did not give up much, you can probably sign a useful player for about what you pay in bonuses and salaries in drafting a useful player.

And that's just the expected return.  Similar to how the mutual funds legalese states, there is no guarantee in the draft that your returns will match the market's return.  There might be a 11% chance of picking up a good player, but will you be good and pick 20% or bad and pick only 5%?

About drafting players good enough to trade, I wish there was a database that shows whether the draft pick was traded or not as that would allow us to analyze what the odds of drafting a player good enough to be a trading piece, but I'm not aware of that.  But as far as actually drafting a good player, the odds have not been good at all, even for the 21st overall pick of the draft, as suggested by the data I collected.  

Believe me, I've generated the CDF of player performance based on draft order and age, but this isn't the Journal of Quantitative Baseball Analysis, so I figured some averages might be more understandable.

Anyways, for every Michael Tucker, Free Agent, there's a Marvin Benard or a Jason Christiansen ready do his impression of a giant (Giant?) money toilet.  Your analysis is incomplete without looking at performance vs. salary for 6+ year players.