Generally Irrelevant and Uniformly Insipid Introduction

The MLB draft will be held on June 8th, and the Braves will have their highest pick (14th) since taking Mike Minor 7th overall in 2009. The Braves also have a higher interest in the draft this year than in most, having snatched up competitive balance picks from Arizona and San Diego and received a compensation pick for the loss of Ervin Santana to free agency. With a high bonus pool allotment and lots of early picks, there's a lot for Braves fans to be on the look-out for come draft day. But the centerpiece of the Braves' draft will be pick number 14, and that's what I'm going to talk about here.

What to Expect

Lots of research has been done on the value of draft picks, including this really useful bit of writing which puts the average WAR of draft picks in the 11-15 range at 5.6. But pick No. 14 isn't at the exact center of that range, and the average WAR doesn't really tell us all that much about the distribution of outcomes. What are the chances of these picks turning into complete busts? How many of them become superstars?

To get a better idea of the range and likelihood of outcomes for middle first-round draft picks, I dug up the team-controlled WAR of every player taken between 9th overall and 19th overall in the 20 June drafts that took place from 1988 through 2007. This includes pick No. 14 as well as the picks within five slots of it in either direction. It may not seem like the 9th and 19th picks have that much to do with ours, but I wanted to broaden the sample to include as many players as possible without reaching into the remote corners at the very beginning and end of Rd. 1. In the end, I think this section serves as a pretty good representation of the "middle of the first round".

In this article, Kiley McDaniel lays out a scheme for converting season WAR thresholds into divisions on the 20-80 scale used in scouting. For instance, an "average regular" is a 50 on the scouting scale, by design. Since the average WAR among full time players is about 2.0, we can say that a 2 WAR player corresponds to a grade of 50. Every five-point increment on the 20-80 scale has a corresponding WAR value, and you can check them out in the article linked to above if you like.

I adapted this conversion table slightly and used it to categorize the prospects into tiers based on their MLB production during years of team control. The table below shows what percentage of draft picks taken between 9th and 19th overall between '88 and '07 met or exceeded the WAR threshold corresponding to each point on the scouting scale. For instance, the 14.1% figure under 60 FV means that 14.1 percent of the 220 players I looked at turned into 60-grade or better players at the major league level based on team-controlled WAR totals.

FV	30	35	40	45	50	55	60	65	70	75	80
% with this outcome or better	100	51.4	32.3	28.6	23.6	18.6	14.1	8.6	4.6	2.3	0.5

A handful of things bear mentioning here. But first, Hollywood's best fairy-tale satire offers some advice to Braves fans:

1. The rate of these draft picks completely busting is pretty high. I reserved the 30 FV category for prospects who either never made it to the big leagues or posted zero (or negative) WAR once they got there. Based on historical results, the Braves' top pick in the upcoming draft has about the same chance (48.6%) of contributing nothing to his team as a flipped quarter does of showing you George Washington in profile. With any luck, we'll see an eagle holding some shit with its feet instead.
2. After the worst outcome, the second most probable outcome is... the second worst outcome. In addition to the staggering number of draft picks that turn out to be complete busts, there's another very solid chunk (about 19%) that contribute less than five WAR to the teams that draft them. This means that only about one third of mid-first round draft picks go on to make a substantial impact in their team- controlled years. I may sound overly precise in distinguishing "overall MLB success of player" from "value added by player to drafting team", but it's an important distinction to make due to cases like R.A. Dickey (18th overall, 1996), who was released by the Rangers after producing a single WAR for them only then to master the knuckleball and ride it to a respectable and productive career with the Mets and Blue Jays. Similarly, Chris Carpenter (15th, 1993) was merely a good young pitcher with the Blue Jays before blossoming into a star in St. Louis under a free agent contract. Contrariwise, Tim Lincecum was a revelation for the Giants in his arbitration seasons, but has since adapted to his uniform colors by turning into a pumpkin.
3. After the twin gut-punches of the 30 FV and 35 FV data, things get better in a hurry. If you're good enough to get past those first two humps, then you're actually (and remarkably) just as likely to be a 65 FV prospect as a 40 FV. There is literally no drop-off in frequency from the 40 FV to 65 FV levels, and all levels in between are about equally likely.
4. Out of the 220 players I looked into, I found one 80 FV draft pick: Chase Utley. He is truly the holy grail of mid first-round draft picks. Having until very recently loathed him with an intensity that I typically reserve for oatmeal raisin cookies that look exactly like chocolate chip until you bite into them, I have now seen the light. After pouring through WAR column after WAR column on baseball-reference and seeing 0.0, 2.1, 0.0, -0.8, 4.1, 0.0, 0.0 repeated ad mortem you too, however phervent in your hatred of his team, would appreciate the majesty of a 40.3.

Some Soft Demographic Analysis

I divided these players into four groups, high school batters; high school pitchers; college batters; and college pitchers, to see whether any subset of mid 1st round picks had a relatively strong or weak history of major league success. No group deviated jarringly from the composite trends outlined above, and college pitchers and high school batters performed almost exactly in line with the averages for the entire sample. As can be seen below, however, college batters out-performed their mid first-round peers by a noticeable margin (26%), while high school pitchers fell short of the total average by roughly the same amount (31%).

Type	30 FV (or better)	35 FV (or better)	40 FV (or better)	45 FV (or better)	50 FV (or better)	55 FV (or better)	60 FV (or better)	65 FV (or better)	70 FV (or better)	75 FV (or better)	80 FV (or better)	Average WAR
HS Batters	100	52.4	34.9	28.6	25.4	20.6	17.4	7.9	3.2	3.2	0	5.5
HS Pitchers	100	41.7	22.9	20.8	20.8	14.5	10.3	6.1	0	0	0	3.7
NCAA Batters	100	55.1	40.8	34.7	30.6	22.4	16.3	8.1	8.1	6.1	2.0	6.8
NCAA Pitchers	100	56.9	32.8	31.1	20.8	17.3	13.8	12.1	6.9	0	0	5.5
Totals	100	51.3	32.3	28.6	23.6	18.6	14.1	8.6	4.6	2.3	0.5	5.4

Here's a line graph of something completely different. Just kidding. It's the same thing.

You can see that high school batters and college pitchers do a lot of crissing and even what some might call a little bit of crossing between the other two lines, while high school pitchers bring up the rear all the way across the board and college batters set the pace everywhere except in the 60-65 FV range where HS batters and college pitchers do about as well or slightly better.

So, what does it all mean? I'm not really qualified to tell you, but I'd guess probably not much. I told Excel to try and find a model that fit the data, but it all it gave me in return was a real buzzkill of a quadratic function that had the nerve to imply that there should be no such thing as a 70 FV or greater prospect drafted in the middle of the first round, so I decided to leave the procedures and conclusions of non-linear regression analysis to people who actually have knowledge of that sort of thing. If you do and you have some input, I'd love to hear it.

There are a couple of things that I find pretty interesting, though. The first is that writers who often contrast a "low floor, high ceiling" HS draft prospect to a "low ceiling, high floor" college one projected to go at about the same point in the draft might be relying on some false notions concerning those types of players. The parameters of this study are admittedly pretty narrow (we're only looking at about a third of one round of the draft), but the college players we looked at here showed that they actually have a greater chance of becoming star players than the kiddos, especially where pitchers are concerned. Also, as we noted above, college batters are pretty consistent in their domination of the field, and Kant could set his watch to the disappointing showing of high school pitchers.

The Braves and the 2015 draft.

Even if you were to take the results of this inquiry as gospel, - and I wouldn't expect or encourage anybody to do that - their applicability to draft strategies would still be very limited. As soon as you start moving college batters up and HS pitchers down on your draft board, you're no longer really dealing with the set of players we looked at here because the newly-considered college batters are getting bumped up from the late first round tier, and for all we know those players might be good for even less WAR than mid first round HS pitchers. At most, you could use this information as a tiebreaker between two players graded equally by your scouts.

Middle infielders Alex Bregman of LSU and Dansby Swanson of Vanderbilt are widely held to be the two best college batters in the upcoming draft, and it would take a miracle for either to fall to the Braves. After them, the second tier appears to be outfielders Ian Happ of Cincinnati and Andrew Benintendi of Arkansas. Both are typically projected to go a few picks earlier than 14, but the draft is tough to predict and there's a reasonable chance that one of them will still be available when the Braves make their selection. After that, the likes of Florida State OF D.J. Stewart and Arizona SS Kevin Newman creep up into the later stages of the first round, but neither is expected to go as high as 14th, and nothing I've read has tied the Braves to either player (or any of the other four, for that matter).

Anyway, here's a taste of what we all have to hope for:

HS Batters

34.4 WAR (11, 2005) 30.7 (13, 1991) 24.6 (14, 2007)

HS Pitchers

23.5 WAR (17, 2002) 21.9 (10, 2007) 21.3 (17, 1991)

College Batters

40.3 WAR (15, 200) 32.8 (12, 1994) 30.5 (16, 1997)

College Pitchers

26.6 WAR (10, 2006) 25.9 (17, 1988) 25.5 (11, 2006)