Cup of Coffee

June 13, 2017: Ice Cold Draft

36 Comments

Twins go cheap with the first pick and draft shortstop Royce Lewis. Later competitive balance picks were the raker Rooker and Canadian northpaw Landon Leach. I know a lot of people were grumbling about not drafting Minnesota arm Sam Carlson, but, eh, it's all a crapshoot anyway.

36 thoughts on “June 13, 2017: Ice Cold Draft”

  1. With how much of a crapshoot it is, I'm generally in favor of saving slot money to get higher upside picks like they did unless there's a fairly hopeful inner-circle guy like Bryce Harper or Ken Griffey on the board.

    1. I don't doubt that Lewis is a great prospect, but I thought it funny when MLB's great plans were foiled not having the #1 pick in-studio for the announcement. At the time of the announcement, the analysts were praising his skills, but there was barely a mention that it could be saving slot money.

      And the Twins haven't once let the clock run out on their pick, btw

      1. I had a nice chat with Trueblood last night who praised the Twins strategy pre-comp round/round 2 picks. He felt Lewis was probably as good a pick as any of the other top group, given relative injury risks and the like for pitchers.

      2. And the Twins haven't once let the clock run out on their pick, btw

        that's some purple prose right there.

    2. We'll see if Lewis truly is going cheap or not. He was generally considered the best position player prospect and is represented by Scott Boras. Maybe they already have a deal generally in place since McKay turned down what the Twins offered him, but it would be very un-Boras like to agree to a below-slot deal before the player is even drafted and so he doesn't have his best bargaining position.

      I read somewhere that the top 5 picks were the consensus top 5, even though there was little consensus as to what the order was going to be and that since none of the top 5 teams went away from the consensus top 5, no one truly "went cheap."

  2. Is the rule that each team only gets so much money to spend on signing bonuses now? If so, it seems like teams with fewer picks are naturally going to wind up with the guys demanding the highest bonuses. Also, there's the angle that if you aren't willing to walk away from the table, at some point the other side is just going to be taking advantage of you.

    I think the crapshoot nature of the draft is somewhat overstated. If you look at the aggregate MLB accomplishments (WAR, JAWS, whatever) for top 10 vs. rest of first round vs. second round, etc., it's clear that overall the system is doing a reasonable job at picking the best players. Yes, there is some variance in there, and it's not uncommon to have a top pick just never make the majors, but if you look at it just as a crapshoot, it's almost like saying the game itself is a crapshoot.

    1. IIRC, the first 10 rounds are "slotted" with each pick assigned an expected value. So you total the value of the slots you have and that is your team's draft bonus budget. A team with fewer picks is going to thus have a lower total value, as they have fewer slot totals to add to their pot.

      1. I see. So if you have more picks, you have the potential to spread your spending around more, but you do get more money for having more picks. So a team with a lot of picks has to kind of pick between spending more on deep picks or spending it mainly on the top pick, but a team with fewer picks is going to be more or less forced to spend close to slot on all their picks.

        1. They're not really "forced" to spend on anything. They're just not allowed to spend more than allotted, or at least they are "punished" for going over the total allotment. If they go over a little bit, they are taxed on how much they go over. If they go over more, they lost a first-round draft pick for next year and they could potentially lose more draft picks. I think the highest punishment for going over is first-round picks the next 2 years. I don't think there is any requirement to spend a certain amount, but if a team doesn't at least spend close to their allotment, it could be a PR nightmare for them.

    2. I agree that isn't, or at least shouldn't be, a crapshoot for the scouts and the people who actually spend a lot of time studying this sort of thing. I think the reason it's overstated is that, as fans, we almost never see these guys play and really don't know much of anything about them, other than what we're told by the experts. Is Hunter Greene or Brandon McKay better than Royce Lewis? I have no idea. So it seems like a crapshoot to me even though, again, for the scouts it shouldn't be.

      1. I mean, there's a lot of randomness after the scouts generally agree on who is good and who isn't. Sure, between Greene, McKay, and Lewis, who knows? But Lewis is well enough regarded that even if he fails, it's hard for me to criticize the pick--the same people that generally get the best players into the first round had him as a high first round guy. Now it's a bit different if the Twins had picked, say, a consensus 3rd-round pick, but almost no one ever goes that far off the beaten path.

        1. Right. You're not going to see a lot of Albert Pujols picks any more. Players in the 1st round prove to be better than picks in the 2nd round and on down the line. And the #1 pick has proven to be the best pick to have based on results. But say, the difference, historically between picks #10 and #11 or #20 and #27 is not significant. In that sense, each round is kind of a crapshoot. But overall they do know what they're doing. Injuries and years of development changes a lot of things.

          1. If we think about the measurables, I'm not that surprised it is a crap shoot.

            In basketball, every player is associated with a ton of measurables if they are getting playing time. And the measurables are highly comparable because of high standardization in the playing environment. The court is always the same and it is indoors. High school players are playing 20-35 games per year with their school teams and possibly twice that many with AAU teams, with the AAU teams traveling a lot so that scouts can see players against like competition frequently.

            In baseball, high school players are likewise playing 20-35 games per year with their school teams, plus possibly a similar number of games with club teams. But you only get a small number of measurable events per player per game (other than starting pitchers).

            So, I think the data stream is just much less likely to provide convergent and reliable estimates of quality for baseball players than for basketball players.

            Add that to the strikingly different player development models in the two sports: deep minor league systems in baseball vs a very shallow system in the NBA built on top of a relatively lucrative college system. I don't think it is all that surprising that baseball continues to draft a lot of high school players and that many fail to pan out.

            so, yea, what ubelmann and beau said. There's pretty wide agreement on tranches of draftable guys in baseball, but a recognition of crapshootiness in rank-ordering them very finely, because the data just doesn't speak that loudly.

            1. Add to that the risk of injury is higher. There aren't many bball players who lose a year of playing time (or a career) due to overwork or improper posting up technique.

            2. I think I feel the need to point out the non-crapshootness of it in terms of the worth of the picks. It doesn't come up a ton in MLB since you can't trade the picks, but having consistent high picks is definitely worth more than consistent low picks in the long run.

              Also, I find it pretty amazing that scouts are as good as they are at scouting baseball when players are so far from their prime. Take someone like Torii Hunter. He's not such an unusual example of a HS draftee that eventually becomes a useful MLB regular. He was drafted in 1993 and had his first 100+ OPS+ season in 2001. At that point he was something like 40% older than when he was drafted.

              Some NBA prospects take longer to develop than others, but generally speaking I think they break into the game as regulars much closer to their draft date. NFL players have a short shelf life, too, and they are usually at college at least 3 years before getting drafted.

              I think Adrian Beltre was something like 16 years old when the Dodgers signed him. Having been 16 years old at one point, that seems like such a huge gamble that I'm almost surprised it ever works out.

              2. Agreed on all points.

                It is really amazing that they can project 16 year-olds with any consistency.

                1. how many 16-year olds get signed and don't pan out? (not snark, just ignorance)

                  I will suggest that taking flyers on 16-year old free-agent signings in baseball is pretty cheap. You can probably sign a dozen or more to get one kid who becomes a successful major leaguer and still justify the cost. And if you get one Adrian Beltre out of every couple dozen otherwise disposable prospects, glorious victory for capitalism!

                  “A 16-year-old doesn’t know how to play baseball,” the Boston Red Sox’s David Ortiz, an eight-time All-Star who grew up in Santo Domingo, told me. “I don’t care what they say. When I signed at 16, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.”

                  (Mother Jones 2013 article)

                  MLB spends on the order of $125 million per year on baseball academies in the Dominican and then another $200 million per year in signing bonuses for an estimated 450-500 kids (or less than $400k per). But only something like 2 percent of the Dominican kids who enter the academies come out of them to make a living in baseball.

                  I don't disagree with ubes' "non-crapshootness" point to the extent that he's saying there is a clear gradient, such that 1st-round picks, on average, are more valuable than 2nd-round picks, on average, which are more valuable than 3rd-round picks, on average, etc. The crapshootness point is two-fold. First, the rank-ordering of choices is pretty fuzzy (how certain are we of the absolute rank-ordering of a sequence of 2, 3, ..., n players? not very).

                  Second, while we may be very sure that, on average, a player picked in the top 10 will be better than a player picked 91-100, there will be the occasional Poo-hole or Piazza. And these lightning strikes will be more frequent than is the case in, say, basketball.

                  2. Sure, I just feel like if you're going to use a game of chance, it's more like poker. Depending on your hand, your odds can be better or worse, and there are good and bad strategies, but there's always a chance the draw doesn't go your way.

                1. Thanks. I knew there was some reason he was my go-to example but it wasn't coming to mind.

    2. I'm going to be at the game on fathers day, and was looking for a pre-game spot. This might just satisfy the slaughter family's needs.

    2. Players fall in the draft who are strongly committed to college or if their agent argues that they are worth more than where they are selected. Teams have been able to sign those players by overpaying for that slot, and the Twins have that flexibility today as rounds 3-10 take place. A Twins official told me this morning that they saved a substantial amount on their first pick (I'm guessing around $1 million) and saved some on their next two picks, the 35th and 37th overall, after that.

      Interesting. If they saved on all of their picks in rounds one and two, I'm curious about who they're going to draft in 3-10.

      1. I'm fine with the strategy if it is used to stock the system with pitchers.

        If it is being used to just spend less, not so fine.

    1. Yeah, the Twins have demoted 3 pitchers because of ineffectiveness and have recalled all 3 (Mejia, Gibson and Wimmers) and it's only June 13.

  7. Anyone have recent experience listing stuff on craigslist? I'm selling off a bike that didn't work out (doh!) and have received way more bot style transactions this time.

    1. I posted some stuff you'd afternoon, and so far no bot messages. No real messages either, though.

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