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July 9, 2003

Lies, Damned Lies

Digging in the Backyard

by Nate Silver

Baseball is the National Game, but at the amateur level, it's also a regional one. The frozen tundra of the Upper Midwest and the rolling hills of the Appalachians do not afford the same opportunity to play the sport year-round as the marshes of Florida, or the sun-drenched ballfields of California.

Major league teams, which collectively are responsible for drafting nearly 1500 players every year--a far bigger burden than their counterparts in other sports face--are keenly aware of the differences. It simply isn't possible, or at least not economically feasible, to develop an accurate scouting report for every amateur prospect in the country. While the top national prospects will be scouted by everyone, teams go regional as the draft moves into its later rounds, focusing on players from their home territories (as the Braves do) or on players from regions in which the level of competition if perceived to be the highest--California, Florida, and the Southwest.

Most of you, I suspect, are aware of these disparities. When a player from a cold-weather state is selected high--like Rocco Baldelli, pride of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, or Joe Mauer, pride of St. Paul, Minnesota--their hometown is mentioned early and often, precisely because such selections are unusual. But it's striking just how profound the differences are. A high school senior from Texas is three times more likely to be drafted into professional ball than a high school senior from New York. A high school senior from Arizona is six times more likely to be drafted than a high school senior from Minnesota. A high school senior from Florida is nine times more likely to be drafted than a high school senior from Illinois.

Let's back up a second. We can come up with a pretty good estimate of the intensity with which a given state is scouted if we know two things: the number of players that are drafted, and the number of players that potentially could be.

The first part is easy--we'll use data from the 2003 amateur draft, focusing on players selected out of high school only, based on their respective home states. College and Juco selections would confuse matters here--institutions of higher learning are not evenly distributed among the population, and the allotment of colleges with good baseball programs is even more skewed. Players flock to where the good programs are, not the other way around.

There isn't, so far as I know, data on just how many high school baseball players there are in each state, but it's easy to come up with a reasonable proxy. The good folks at the Census Bureau have prepared a wealth of data organized by different demographic categories. One of these categories is age; the census estimated the number of 15-19 year olds in each state as of 2000 (you can find the data here, but be warned--the PDF file linked is massive).