Baseball drafting is a weird thing, you know? It’s not like basketball or football or even hockey, where draftees are more often than not playing at the top level within a year or so of being selected. So the effects of missing on a draft pick can sometimes take three, four, or five years to really manifest themselves and become clear.
All of it is an inexact science. And this article is no different. But over the past few years, there’s been a lot of attention paid to how badly the Phillies have been whiffing on their drafts (with some exceptions, few and far between), and so I wanted to see if they had been missing on their highest-value picks more frequently and more starkly than the rest of the league. You know, to put numbers to feelings, like we tend to do in this sport.
I looked at first-round draft picks from every team from 2010 through 2016. The first round is typically the most important, as it’s often each team’s best chance to snag high-end talent. The 2017 through 2020 drafts were excluded since too few players from those drafts have reached the Majors so far (see what I mean about it taking years to show?). Using rWAR for a high-level measurement and Baseball-Reference’s draft data, I compared these first-rounders (including supplemental and Competitive Balance picks) with the average and median rWAR of the subsequent 10 picks, along with the delta between each pick and the rolling “Next 10” median. No one would accuse this of being the most airtight, scientific study, but it should give us an idea.
Highest Team Pick/Next 10 Delta (2010-16 Combined)
- Astros, 71.2
- Nationals, 57.0
- Athletics, 53.2
- Orioles & White Sox (tie), 38.5
Highest Player Pick/Next 10 Delta (Year-By-Year)
2010: Chris Sale, 45.1 (13th overall)
2011: Anthony Rendon, 24.3 (6th)
2012: Carlos Correa, 19.3 (1st)
2013: Kris Bryant, 23.0 (2nd)
2014: Matt Chapman, 20.7 (25th)
2015: Alex Bregman, 23.0 (2nd)
2016: Dakota Hudson, 3.3 (34th)
One thing this rough-hewn metric can help point out, apart from identifying which players were picked just in time, is how big a “steal” a given player was. Again, this doesn’t factor in things like signing bonuses and pre-draft motivations/intentions (or injury history, in Rendon’s case), which have a significant impact on teams’ draft strategy.
George Springer (22.5), Carlos Correa (19.3), and Alex Bregman (23.0) account for nearly 65 of the 71.2 rWAR delta in the Astros’ total. Sonny Gray and the late Jose Fernandez were the best picks of the 10 following Houston snagging him 11th overall in 2011, but zeroes from Jed Bradley (MIL), Chris Reed (LAD), a negative from Tyler Beede (TOR, though he did not sign in ’11), and barely anything from Taylor Jungmann (MIL again) show that Houston pretty clearly didn’t miss a no-brainer instead of Springer. Fernandez may have altered that equation. The picks following Correa at 1st overall in 2012 were all Major Leaguers except for Mark Appel (who did not sign in ’12 when PIT picked him 8th) but none has accrued even half of Correa’s rWAR to date. Bregman was followed by a lot of mush, save maybe for Andrew Benintendi and Ian Happ on a good day. The Phillies’ Cornelius Randolph pick contributed a fat zero here.
The short moral of this little parable is that it can be good to pick in the top 3 multiple times, but it can be kind of perilous too. Just ask Appel.
The Phillies Misses
So now that we’ve built out some idea about how this is all working, let’s get micro and try to tackle the big question: Have the Phillies’ first-round draftees in the 2010s resulted in more painful misses than other teams’, given the players drafted soon after?
The Phillies are 16th in the team equation, in the black at 14.35 on aggregate. But this is where things get tricky: Aaron Nola rates out at 19.1 rWAR above his Next 10 delta…and four of the remaining seven picks grade negative. Two of those four (Larry Greene, Jr. and Shane Watson) never made the Majors, while Mitch Gueller (who also never debuted) grades out as 0.0 thanks to a weak crop following his selection. It may be a little strange to think of guys who never even made it to the Majors as somehow “better” than those who’ve posted negative WARs so far, but if you think about it more literally as to what the stat is trying to show…it almost makes a warped kind of sense.
The Phillies’ picks each year go like this:
- 2010: Jesse Biddle, -1.2 (27th)
- 2011: Larry Greene, -4.3 (39th)
- 2012: Shane Watson, -2.2 (29th) and Mitch Gueller, 0.0 (54th)
- 2013: J.P. Crawford, 3.2 (16th)
- 2014: Aaron Nola, 19.1 (7th)
- 2015: Cornelius Randolph, 0.1 (10th)
- 2016: Mickey Moniak, -0.4 (1st)
So the answer to our question is…not necessarily. At least, not as far as this one perspective goes. Their worst miss is Greene, as expected; with Jackie Bradley, Jr. going immediately after selecting a now-infamous bust, there’s no getting around that. Randolph has turned out to be a poor selection as far as his development’s gone, but he wasn’t immediately followed by many picks who’ve enjoyed a ton more success, either.
What stands out as a bigger issue, and is a bit more difficult to quantify, is the organization’s lagging player development pipeline. Far too many players, first round or otherwise, have failed to successfully graduate from the Phillies pipeline that it’s often forced their hand into trades and free agency. The vicious cycle that then emerges when compensation pick players are signed — including recent examples like Carlos Santana, Jake Arrieta, and Bryce Harper — is second- or third-round picks being sacrificed to buttress the Major League team while tightening the valve on the prospect pipes. A different issue for a different day.
Again, this is hardly definitive or authoritative. It ends up being something of an entertaining look at the first and supplemental first rounds from most of the previous decade, with results that at the same time confirm and rebut the notion that the Phils have had worse success than their peers in the first round. With more promising draft classes like 2018’s (Adam Haseley, Spencer Howard, Connor Brogdon) beginning to make an impact, there’s hope that perception (and reality!) will take a turn for the better sooner than later.
The Phrontiersman 