Atlanta Braves Draft Choices Still a Mystery
By Fred Owens
Not Unique
The Braves have selected pitching as about a 50% of their selections since 1965. Oddly the biggest drop off in a period was when Bobby Cox was GM.
While we’ve heard a lot about the way the Cubs changed their strategy since they changed GMs the facts say that they too continue to draft pitching at about a 50% rate. The Astros are held up as an example of a different plan as well but guess what, they too draft around 50% pitching.
It looks like everyone’s drafting a lot of pitching and the shortage at the of good dependable arms at the major league level validates TNSTAAPP.
TNSTAAPP?
(If you know what TNSTAAPP is skip to the next slide.)
The undeniable fact is that pitchers break; more so today than in the past and at a younger age. This idea that there is no such thing as a pitching prospect was first proffered back in the 1990s by Gary Huckabay and the acronym is now a permanent part of the lexicon of baseball; TNSTAAPP. Joe Sheehan wrote about it in detail for Baseball Prospectus back in 2003.
". . . The principles behind TNSTAAPP are pretty simple. Pitchers are unpredictable. They’re asked to perform an unnatural act–throw baseballs overhand–under great stress, thousands of times a year. They get hurt with stunning frequency, sometimes enough to cost them a career, more often just enough to hinder their effectiveness . . . It’s only the very top 0.1% of pitchers who are consistently good year-in and year-out over substantial careers . . . If you can’t predict where most major-league pitchers will be two years out, it’s quite a conceit to think you can predict where any minor-league pitcher will be even one year out."
"TNSTAAPP, to a certain extent, means throwing up your hands and admitting that there’s no way of knowing which pitchers are going to come through that wringer intact. . . The path from dominating teenagers in . . . to being a successful major-league pitcher is long and difficult. One-hundred forty years into the baseball industry, how to navigate that path is still an open question, and while there’s been progress, I see no one turning teenagers into rotation starters on a regular basis . . ."
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