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May 13, 2005

Doctoring The Numbers

The Draft

by Rany Jazayerli

For most teams, the most important day of the year isn't Opening Day, or a day in October that ends in a dogpile, or the November day that marks the start of free-agent season. No, for most teams, the red-letter day falls on the first Tuesday of June, a day that involves sitting around a telephone, on a conference call with 29 other teams and the Commissioner's office, a day on which, if you're really, really lucky, you get to say something like this: "the Chicago Cubs select Redraft Number two-six-four-one, Mark William Prior, University of Southern California."

Sexy, it's not. Neither is it all that telegenic, although it certainly could be if MLB ditched the conference call for an amphitheatre with good lighting and tried to make a production out of it. There's no denying its importance, though. There is no source of talent that comes close to matching what's available in what is officially called the Rule 4 Draft. Moreover, there is almost no way to build a successful ballclub without some measure of success in the draft. (The Yankees are trying to prove that last sentence incorrect. They are not succeeding.)

It's one thing for the media to treat the baseball draft with far less reverence than its football counterpart. Historically, it has been taken far less seriously by the participants. Some football teams were using sophisticated, computer-aided analysis of potential draft picks as far back as the early 1970s. For the first 20 years of the baseball draft, so little effort was made by teams to hone their draft strategies that it was revolutionary when Bill James discovered, as he wrote in the 1985 Baseball Abstract, that "not only is there no basis for the prejudice against the drafting of college players, but in fact the reverse is true." He went on to state that "the rate of return on players drafted out of college is essentially twice that of high school players."

Keep in mind, in the early years of the draft, it was an inviolable concept that the best way to create a superstar was to find an athletic 18-year-old with the good face and mold him into one. Take 1971, for instance, in which every first-round pick was drafted out of high school. All those picks yielded just two stars (Jim Rice and Frank Tanana) and two more quality players (Rick Rhoden and Craig Reynolds). Take 1977, when 21 of the 26 first-round picks were high schoolers. The five college players included Paul Molitor, Bob Welch and Terry Kennedy. Of the high-school players, aside from Harold Baines and Bill Gullickson--the first two picks in the draft--the only picks that had any kind of substantial major-league careers were Rich Dotson, Wally Backman and Dave Henderson.

Teams finally started to catch on in the early 1980s. In 1981, more college players than high schoolers were taken in the first round, the first time that had occurred. For their efforts, teams selecting from the college ranks were rewarded with Mike Moore, Joe Carter and Ron Darling; the best high-school players picked that year were Dick Schofield and Daryl Boston.

Nevertheless, the inefficiencies in the baseball draft continued to vastly exceed the inefficiencies in every other method of talent acquisition, in large part because no team seemed willing or able to exploit those inefficiencies at all. They were all drafting with one eye closed. (The A's may be the exception to the rule; they started focusing on college talent soon after Charlie Finley sold the team in 1980.) Even as it became acceptable to select college players in the early rounds of the draft, the notion that teams ought to pay attention to the production of those players while in college--the idea that college statistics matter--is a remarkably recent innovation, as chronicled in Moneyball.