June 9, 2005

Doctoring The Numbers

The Draft, Part Five

by Rany Jazayerli

I had hoped to complete my series on the draft before, you know...the draft. That didn't happen, but that doesn't mean we can't soldier on. Enough with the whole high school/college thing. Let's just jump into the pitcher vs. hitter angle, shall we?

Here are the 15-year WARP lines for all pitchers and all hitters, from 1984 through 1999:

Player  Y0   Y1   Y2   Y3   Y4   Y5   Y6   Y7   Y8   Y9   Y10  Y11  Y12  Y13  Y14  Y15 TOTAL

H      0.00 0.04 0.16 0.33 0.51 0.68 0.84 0.89 0.99 0.92 0.83 0.81 0.63 0.65 0.48 0.38  9.13
P      0.01 0.08 0.24 0.48 0.65 0.71 0.76 0.74 0.68 0.62 0.64 0.55 0.49 0.43 0.40 0.34  7.83

As you can see, for all years and all players, hitters do enjoy a modest advantage of about 17% over pitchers drafted in the same slot. (Although, if you look at the data through Y10 only, the advantage is just 10%.) This is not surprising; TNSTAAPP didn't come out of nowhere, after all. If anything, the advantage was a little smaller than I would have suspected.

Let's break the data down into early (1984-91) and late (1992-99) groups:

Player  Y0   Y1   Y2   Y3   Y4   Y5   Y6   Y7   Y8   Y9   Y10  Y11  Y12  Y13  Y14  Y15 TOTAL

H, -91 0.00 0.07 0.23 0.37 0.51 0.67 0.82 0.91 0.98 0.86 0.83 0.80 0.61 0.65 0.48 0.38  9.15
P, -91 0.01 0.11 0.32 0.56 0.73 0.78 0.86 0.75 0.71 0.68 0.64 0.59 0.53 0.43 0.40 0.34  8.45


Player  Y0   Y1   Y2   Y3   Y4   Y5   Y6   Y7   Y8   Y9   Y10 TOTAL

H, 92+ 0.00 0.02 0.08 0.27 0.51 0.69 0.88 0.88 1.00 1.05 0.83  6.21
P, 92+ 0.00 0.05 0.16 0.41 0.57 0.65 0.63 0.74 0.62 0.49 0.63  4.95

The advantage enjoyed by hitters of all stripes, which was a mere 8% in the early half of our study, increased to 25% in the second half of the study, even though the later subset of player is missing years 11 through 15, which significantly favored the hitters in the early group.

This certainly would lend some credence to TNSTAAPP theory; teams may have gotten better at drafting high school talent in the 1990s, but they showed no signs at cracking the code for how to identify which pitchers will go on to stardom and which ones will break down.

Let's break the data down into its four component groups, separating players into high-school pitchers, high-school hitters, college pitchers and college hitters. First, the composite data:

Player  Y0   Y1   Y2   Y3   Y4   Y5   Y6   Y7   Y8   Y9   Y10  Y11  Y12  Y13  Y14  Y15 TOTAL

HS H   0.00 0.00 0.02 0.12 0.24 0.42 0.59 0.69 0.75 0.76 0.77 0.70 0.52 0.53 0.26 0.17  6.54
HS P   0.00 0.00 0.01 0.20 0.40 0.51 0.58 0.64 0.67 0.55 0.57 0.60 0.48 0.49 0.43 0.34  6.47
COL H  0.00 0.10 0.33 0.60 0.90 1.04 1.20 1.17 1.31 1.11 0.90 0.98 0.79 0.83 0.79 0.68 12.75
COL P  0.01 0.12 0.37 0.63 0.79 0.81 0.85 0.84 0.69 0.62 0.67 0.52 0.49 0.36 0.33 0.27  8.37

The first thing that jumps out is the huge difference in value between college and high-school picks; remember, this data looks at all players drafted from 1984 to 1999. But while hitters are, on the whole, significantly more valuable than pitchers when looking at the collegiate pool, there's essentially no difference whatsoever in the value of high-school hitters vs. high-school pitchers.

Before we jump to any conclusions, though, I'm going to break the data down into rounds: Round 1 refers to the first 30 picks in the draft, Round 2 refers to picks 31-70, and Round 3 refers to picks 71-100. Furthermore, I'm going to break the data up to look at 1984-91 separately from 1992-99. Here's how the numbers shook out between 1984 and 1991:

Player        1st Rd  2nd Rd  3rd Rd  Average

HS H, 84-91    16.13    2.11    1.03     5.99
HS P, 84-91     7.74    6.98    2.51     5.87
COL H, 84-91   26.24    5.91    9.94    13.22
COL P, 84-91   18.48    6.79    4.14     9.50

College hitters taken in the first three rounds are significantly better values than college pitchers, who are significantly better value than either species of high-school talent.

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