How the Braves front office was worth nearly 3 WAR on draft day
The MLB Rule 4 Draft was on June 9, and with it came a new crop of prospects for the Atlanta Braves. They all have their own fun radar gun readings and YouTube channels full of sweet swings. But as with any draft, these new players come with a whole host of questions.
In this post, we’ll dive into things to different charts and figures to see just how successful these new Braves draftees (kids) are going to be.
The short answer? A lot of first rounders turn out to be busts.
New Drafting Approach
There’s an interesting corollary here: the overall strategy at the top of the draft seems to be shifting a bit. Teams seem to be valuing prospects’ “signability” more and more. Organizations at the top of the draft are essentially trading down to select multiple top 20 talents. Rather than a top 5 talent selection and then a top 40 talent, teams like the Braves are looking at other options. (To relate to NFL, Bill Belichick watched this draft with pride)
Consider This: the Cincinnati Reds saved roughly a million dollars by selecting third baseman Nick Senzel with the number two pick in 2016. They then reallocated that money to acquire more premium expensive talent later in the draft. The Reds beat writers called this the Houston Astros’ draft model.
The Braves did basically the same thing this year by picking pitcher Ian Anderson with the third pick in the draft. Atlanta reportedly saved nearly $3 million below slot with him, and then picking more high schoolers with their 40th and 44th overall selections.
Why Are Teams Going This Route?
The idea makes kinda sense: Get three top 20 talents, instead of just one top 20 talent. Ok, sure—but does that work? Loading up on top 20 guys, aren’t you missing out on the top 5 guys?
Think of it this way…would you rather have a couple top 20 prospects or one top 5 prospect?
Those top 5 talents sure do seem fun…
Let’s Look At The Data
Compiled from 2000-2010, this data comes from a bygone era before the slot system came into existence. Teams had different financial incentives back then, and probably took the best players available at the top of the draft more so than they do now.
This can basically be broken down into to two charts. (Note: I extended the data set in order to include the top 45 picks, instead of the just the top 30.)
I broke things down into 5 pick slots to gain some insight into the success/value of each of the picks. The idea is that these 5 pick slots tell us the general success rate of picks in that range. It’s probably easier with a chart…
So basically the Braves used to go for Bucket 1:
- One top 5 pick +
- One top 40 pick +
- One top 45 pick
To something closer to Bucket 2:
- Three top 20 picks
I averaged the rate of success for these buckets and came up with the following two charts, which indicate that the Braves decision to acquire top 20 picks was a good idea by about 7%.
So the Braves turned a 77% chance of a bust on all three picks into a 70% chance of a bust on all three picks! Wow, this really underscores how many of these picks turn out to be busts.
Since we’re in the baseball analysis community are prone to turn things into WAR, I feel the need to delve into the idea of a fractional player.
Let’s do a little more fun stuff with math!
Since the Braves had three picks this year, and each of those represent a player, we can easily multiply each of the percentages laid out above by 3 to find the number of “players” that will end up that way.
Inevitably, we’ll get to the idea of fractional players, but just trust the math. Then, since we have the rough WAR of each of those buckets, we can estimate the WAR of those top 3 picks across the first 6 years of team control.
So by “trading back” or simply using their pool allotment more effectively, the Braves earned themselves roughly 2.5 wins. There’s still a 70% chance that none of these guys works out, but that’s OK. At least we have some empirical evidence that the Braves front office is making the right baseball decisions.
Contributing post from Sean Morash. You can follow Sean on Twitter @OTBB_Sean
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