What does everyone think about the policy of focusing mostly on college players? I understand that high school pitchers are a huge risk, and that it makes more sense to draft college pitchers. But I haven't seen anything that suggests the same thing for hitters. However, JP seems to think there's an advantage to college hitters (as do other teams). I think a team could do well focusing on college pitchers and high school hittes, as with so many teams ignorning high school hitters you should be able to get good ones later in the draft.

I think that it is just that college statistics offer more predictive value than high school statistics. Players are further along the developmental track, so the manifest skill set is less of a crapshoot than with high school stats. There is also less noise involved in college stats than high school stats.

There's a bunch of other factors as well. One major one is that college players who have their first professional season at 21 or 22, you can keep them until they are 24, 25 or 26 before they are exposed to the Rule 5 draft, and until they are 27 or 28 before they are free agents.

High school players who have their first pro season at 18 or 19, you can keep them out of the Rule 5 until they are 22. They are free agents at 25. So you get less meaningful development time from them.

I thought it was interesting that Sickels thought that Hill would end up at 2nd. Between Adams and Hill, it has always been discussed that Adams was the more likely one to move to 2nd and Hill would stay at short.

Since all college players were once high school players, it stands to reason that the pool of high school players has a greater number of future stars in it.

Some of those want to go to college or else demand huge signing bonuses. Others are difficult to identify.

But if you have a talented position player who wants to turn pro and will sign for reasonable money, I think it's a good idea to pick them. If they really are any good, the necessity for putting them on the 40-man roster earlier isn't a big deal.

Almost every draft-eligible position player that became an impact player for the Jays was drafted out of high school. John Olerudf is about the only exception I can think of. Gross, Adams and Hill might break that trend.

I wouldn't be averse to selecting a high-school position player in rounds 1 or 2, but I think the Jays are better off drafting college pitchers over high-school hurlers.

I think the Jays regard Adams as a bona fide major league shortstop - with testimory from no less than Mike Bordick.

I don't think they are as optimistic about Hill's defense. I think Hill will hit for more power than Adams and his bat will be good enough to play third base (Sickels doesn't agree), perhaps in he neighbourhood of a Bill Mueller. There's this idea that 3Bs have to be power hitters - I think that's misguided: I'll take a high-OBP linedrive hitter there over a Dean Palmer-type anyday.

My speed scores suggets that Adams is quicker than Hill, which suggests that it might be a strain for Hill to play second base in the majors. I think he'll be our next long-term third-baseman, with Hinske shifting to 1B, the outfield, or traded.

I believe that for re-stocking the farm, it was a sound strategy to draft college players and mainly pitchers. Overall and having a healthy farm, there should be a solid scouting effort and the best available player should be sought after and picked even if he is young (HS). See Cheng ( 18y ) signing it may signal a new strategy. K Goldstein from BA often makes fun of BJ's front office in his daily summary pointing out that many of our top prospects were high schoolers

I agree completely with Robert's comments about Hill, and what one should expect from a third baseman. There have been many very successful major league third basemen who got on base a lot and had little or moderate power only. Stan Hack, Bill Madlock, Bill Mueller...

I think the Jays will take a high schooler early or even in the first round at some point. But not until they get a virtual assembly line of decent prospects moving up through the system. Maybe after a couple of more drafts. And then only when they're presented with a player who is an obvious pick (like an Eric Chavez or Jeremy Bonderman).

And Goldstein can make fun of the front office but to me it doesn't make much sense to do so because these guys are still in Toronto and are being nurtured like top prospects. They aren't being treated like lepers or being traded off for lesser players just because they were drafted out of high school. In fact Rios, Quiroz, and McGowan took their biggest steps forward under the new organization. Maybe coincidence, maybe not. But certainly not evidence they don't value younger players.

And Quiroz wasn't even a high school player; he was a high priced free agent. And the Jays are still signing prominent young international free agents (Rodriguez and Chin-Cheng) so I don't think they can be counted out in that arena.

All the current philosophy says is that they want guys who will get to AA and AAA and the majors and be productive as soon as possible without respect to their ceilings. That gives them players to work with, either to play or trade. Not necessarily star players but did Boston trade star players to get Schilling? Hardly. Volume and speed of development is very important to a team with a limited budget.

R Billie,

I don't think they should be drafting bulk guys to use as trade chips or fillers. It's precisely the low and mid-budget teams that can't afford to do that, because they generally can't afford to get high quality free agents. No one remembers the bulk guys a farm system produces - they can be acquired without difficulty on the open market. One remembers the Delgados, Fernandez's, Keys, Stiebs and Greens.

Besidea, I honestly believe that J.P. and company thought that Adams and Hill were the best prospects with the highest ceilings available for the money they were willing to spend (in their draft position).

Well the A's have traded away a huge pile of prospects in the last two or three years to get the guys they wanted. DePodesta acknowledged that a large benefit of the college approach is that you produce trading chips sooner. Having that depth enabled them to acquire major leaguers like Koch, Foulke, Dye, Damon, Durham, and others. And as a smaller budget team you'd rather trade for a good major leaguer in his walk year than give up draft picks to sign guys.

In the case of Adams and Hill, yes I'm sure they were what the Jays felt were the best picks for the money but they were also picks that fit their profile. College guys with good track records and middle infielders to boot, statistically the most "successful" type of first round pick. The Jays are playing a system and they're playing it for a reason; they think in the long run they'll produce more players and they'll produce them faster on a relatively small player development budget.

There's no evidence I've ever seen that the percentage of college position players drafted in the 1st or 2nd round that become impact players is greater than that of high school position players.

Secondly, the signing bonuses for Hill and Adams are in-line with those received by other middle-first round pikcs, so they weren't drafted because they were cheap.

It is true that they'll get to the majors quicker than a high school player, but that's far less important that what they'll be able to contribute once they get here.

Even if the overall success rate for college players is not higher than the success rate for high school players, I believe it still can make sense for the Jays to concentrate on college players.
Things like level of competion, strengh of schedule, and park factors are much more easily assessed for college as opposed to high school players. This lets the Jays combine a statistical approach with traditional scouting to a much greater degree when going after college players.
This should help the Jays increase their own success rate compared to average success rates when drafting college players. For high school players they would not have the same advantage and may not be any more successful than the average.

Some of the problems with college stats:

1) The season isn't very long, hence the sample sizes aren't large.

2) With various schedules being played and strength of schedule differing widely, it's nearly impossible to predict how all the prospects would perform on a level playing field.

I think direct observation is more important than statistical evaluation of college players. I don't believe you ought to draft a college player in the high rounds that isn't one of the better players on his team, but beyond that the stats are only a minor help.

Nevertheless, the general principle holds: a college player is closer to a finish product and therefore ought to be much easier to project than a high-schooler. But what if none of the college players available to you project to be possible stars and there's a high schooler that has a decent shot at being one? The goal of a farm system is to produce impact players. The spare parts really aren't all that important: you can pick up a Dave Berg without too much problem.

I agree that the difference between high school hitters and college hitters is hard to define. Definately not so with pitchers though. There is a huge advantage to college pitchers as even in short seasons the extra instruction and innings goes a great deal towards demonstrating ability and proving durability of an arm at a later stage of physical development.

However the selection of Aaron Hill over Lastings Milledge, Chris Lubanski, or Ryan Harvey is not because he has the highest possible ceiling but because of these four players. It's because the Jays feel guys like Aaron Hill and Michael Aubrey are much more likely to reach their ceilings because they have been proven against a slightly higher level of competition with a higher level of instruction. Outside of possibly Young who is a pretty special hitter already (but one that costs $3.7 million and a first overall pick) there wasn't a sure fire high schooler available.

With Aaron Hill and Russ Adams the issue isn't whether they'll make the majors. Most scouts are feel they'll have a place there and relatively quickly. And they certainly project higher than Dave Berg. A lot of other teams agree and went the college route as well and many of the high school picks that were made in the first round were pitchers. Now you can argue the Jays should have went for raw power and hitting ability over position playability, particularly with Adams. But more and more teams are not willing to pay bonuses on par for 18 year olds who may have a higher ceiling but are much more variable in their results. And the difference between high school and college talent in terms of ceiling isn't tremendous; more of the best players are accepting free rides to college and national exposure over spending an extra two years or so in the low-minors.

I'm not interested in higher ceiling; I'm interested in percentage chance of becoming an impact player. For example, Milledge may have a higher ceiling than Hill, and may have a 5% chance of becoming an impact player; Hill may have a slightly lower ceiling but may have a 10% chance of becoming an impact player. The reason for this is that the younger the player, the greater range of what he could one day become (boom or bust).

But if you have a college player who has, say, only a 1% chance of becoming an impact player, then I say that it makes no sense to choose him over someone like Milledge.

The morale of the story is that we can never know anyone's ceiling and so we can never know what his ceiling is or was. That's why I chose the phrase "impact player".

There are a couple of other factors that go into the Jay drafting strategy of the last two years and for the foreseeable future: draft order and the ability to gather knowledge about a huge number of prospects.

The Jays have been drafting in the teens the last 2 years, and it is likely that their draft order will be getting worse over the next few years. By that point in the first round in the draft, the high-schoolers who have a good chance to be great, the Alex Rodriguezes, are gone. They're usually gone by the 3rd or 4th pick in the draft.

With regard to the second aspect, it is pretty much impossible to obtain reliable scouting reports on every possible prospect in the draft. By narrowing one's focus to college players, it becomes much easier to get the in-depth information that results in selections like Vermilyea and Chiaravallotti. Vito went to the same college as Tim Stauffer, and so it was much easier for the Jays to get a complete read on him than it would be for a high school kid somewhere.

I believe that the strategy in the Jay context is a wise one.

Yes Mike, that's another point I missed. The highly ranked high school guys that everyone knows about are not going to be a problem for the Jays to scout but they aren't going to be able to compete with organizations who have two or three times the player development budget in terms of depth of coverage. The reason the Jays can identify guys like Jamie Vermilyea and Vito C well down on their draft list is that they can spend more time looking at each player if they focus mostly on colleges.

And then only when they're presented with a player who is an obvious pick (like an Eric Chavez or Jeremy Bonderman).

Bonderman wasn't Beane's pick, if you remember your Moneyball

It's more interesting to think that two of the Jays' three current superstars were drafted out of high school (and the third drafted as an amateur free agent).

Hopefully, J.P. will nab the occasional high schooler.

I mean, "signed as an an amateur free agent".

That whole Bonderman episode in Moneyball has been categorically denied by Beane. It doesn't seem possible that, in a progressive organisation like Oakland, Beane would not have personally okayed the first round pick.

That was where Bonderman was ranked on their list of players. Beane was angry that their other players were all picked first but according to the plan they agreed upon beforehand, Bonderman was the best player available on their board.

I don't ever advocate ignoring high schoolers, even pitchers. You always have to be flexible when exceptional players are involved. But it's tough to tell the Jays that they have to always draft a balance between hitters and pitchers and high school and college.

Some thought has to be given to a team's current situation and needs and the most pressing need for the Jays has been the lack of quality arms the system has produced since the days of Halladay, Carpenter, Escobar, and Koch. Their current draft strategy is an effort to fill that need. If this was an organization short on talented hitters then I think we'd see a slightly different strategy taken; high school hitters are generally a lot safer than high school pitchers and if the Jays needed bats they could go with a mix.

for the sake of the above disscussion teenager free agents and highschoolers are basically the same. Actually foreigners as latinamericans or asian are behind highschoolers in eta's as they have a new language to learn a new culture to grab etc.
Cheng was a nice surprise for me ( i guess us ) as it shows there is more on the works than PR's are telling the press.

To be honest, I think it's still too early to evaluate the Jays' current draft strategy. We won't really know until 2005 or even later, when JP's picks arrive in the bigs. Just how many of them will be regulars? How many will bring in other talent in trades? And how good will the ones that make it be? I think JP has to stick with his plan until he sees how it turns out.