A look at the last ten drafts

Mauer himself makes it the most successful draft of the decade—getting a player of that quality, AND a guy who’s been solid in your rotation for a year and a half…that’s pretty good. The Morneau draft was really just Morneau—other than Bowen nobody else really had a career, even if a few guys made the majors. And Bowen has been a marginal backup.

Good thing you started with 1999. 1998 was an all-time draft disaster for the Twins. I only have the first 15 rounds, but among those players, there is 1 that the Twins signed and who made the majors. Saul Rivera. He got to the majors 8 years and 4 organizations later. Look at the first 5 rounds for the Twins that year:

Ryan Mills
Marcus Moseley
Brent Hoard
Peter Fisher
Mike Blount

Yikes, that’s terrible. (I looked it up. A few later round picks got cups of coffee from that draft, but literally nobody with any impact. The best guys they drafted that year the didn’t sign. JJ Putz and Mike Gosling—and even they aren’t great shakes).

One amazing thing about the Twins rise to competitiveness in this decade is the fact that they had 3 very high picks in a row from 1998-2000 (Mills, Garbe, Johnson) that were complete busts. Usually that sets a low payroll franchise back, but they managed around it. They did well in later rounds, primarily, and made some canny trades. But to get nothing out of those 3 picks, then get good just when it should be those guys driving you is impressive.

I was looking at the draft history a few days ago, and you can really see how the Twins have honed in recently with their early picks. They are really focused on High School position players and college pitchers early, almost exclusively. The exception was the 2004 draft when they had all those first rounders. Even then, their first two picks followed that pattern (Plouffe and Perkins) though then they took a couple of risks on HS arms (Waldrop and Rainville).

thanks for doing this. Now that that’s out of the way…let me complain about your rating system. I see several problems that I think create a misleading ranking based on your points:

1. It’s not clear to me why points should be awarded for players that reach AA or AAA—that isn’t really the point. The point is to draft future major leaguers. I can sort of see it…if they advance enough (even if not ultimately to the majors) maybe they help you as trade bait. That’s a reach, though.

2. Points for the 40 man…a lot of times, that’s an accounting issue, not a talent issue. I know teams try to put their best talent on the 40 man, but that isn’t always how it works out. Some guys get protected who never get to the majors.

3. Giving points for getting there…OK. I understand that’s a natural cutoff—did he make the majors or not? But realistically, should the Twins get “credit” because they rewarded Tommy Watkins with an expanded-roster spot late in a nothing season and gave him a few PAs?

I admire your attempt to do this with some more or less objective system, but I’m not sure this works all that well.

Your point system will only work when comparing different teams of the same season, or in the future when all of these players are retired. You can’t compare season to season this way because the older years have the advantage of having more time to develop.

…related to how I establish my personal rating systems, etc. But in reality, several of you have stated reasons why I do things as I do. I value performance in the minor league organization. My year end All-Star teams are based totally on performance. This is much the same.

We all know that one of the biggest jumps for a player to make successfully is the move from single A ball to AA. Once successful at AA, a player has a much higher probability of making it to the Twins. Thus, I began there with a point, added another point for making it to AAA and another for making the 40-man roster. Unlike some of you, I believe the Twins put a great deal of value into a players move to the 40-man. Many of you will also recall that players realize what this means. Think back to some of Pat Neshek’s comments on his site and in discussions with Seth at the time he was added. It is a huge move in player development and adding value to a rating system I believe does have merit.

Thomas Boswell, a columnist in the Washington Post has had a running discussion of the draft over the past 3 months or so, when it seemed obvious the National’s would draft Strasburg.

In the beginning, he advocated AGAINST drafting Strasburg, particularly because of the money he will demand/command. Particularly, given that since 1965, NO HOF type pitchers have come out of the 1st 3 picks of the draft, in fact, the best are/were 150-150 type pitchers, Andy Benes probably being the most successful.

I am doing this from memory, but I think he stated that from the 1st Round of the draft, since 1965 there is ONLY ONE HOF type pitcher, Roger Clemens, picked 18th in his year.

He posits that position players are more predictable, and in the same time frame there are 20 HOF position players coming from the 1st round of the draft. The difference? Injuries.

Regards,

I like the ranking system. Is is simple, and relatively objective. I also think it makes a lot of sense to distinguish between different levels of quality where players didn’t make a significant impact at the MLB level.

The reason is this: the goal is to investigate how good a team is at drafting. A prospect is a random variable. Roger Clemens wasn’t going to be a HOFer at age 18. There was a chance he would get injured, that he wouldn’t be able to learn to refine his pitches, (that he wouldn’t discover HGH), etc.. The same is true for Mike Piazza (late round pick). This isn’t destiny, this isn’t perfectly predictable. These are a series of odds. To rate, retrospectively, whether one player was a good pick is a mistake. For instance, was Mark Prior a mistake of a draft pick, because he essentially had one (or was it two) good years? Or was it management/bad luck that led to an injury?

If you are choosing between two potential picks, and you expect one to make it to A, and one to make it to AAA, who should you choose? It seems to me that you choose the AAA pitcher. Alternatively, you could choose the player that you think has the better probability of making a meaningful MLB impact, but I would argue that these two factors are correlated. Since we can’t retrospectively assess whether a player had a 10% or 90% chance of doing that, I think that ranking them by how far they actually got makes more sense.

Lastly, there is still a problem with this ranking system (two actually), which are harder to deal with. The first is consideration of draft position. I am not impressed by teams that turn the #1 pick into a good player. When you look at the Clemens’, A-Rods, Griffeys, Longoria, etc, it is pretty obvious that players should be good with the #1 pick. Number 30, on the other hand, has a lower expectation. So, you can’t say that Mauer was a better pick than Piazza, for instance, because it looks like he is likely to have a better career. Piazza was an amazing pick, because they found value in the 10 zillionth round (give or take).