Batter's Box Interactive Magazine - 18 August 2007: Just Wondering

18 August 2007: Just Wondering

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is it or is it not the Accepted Wisdom that if you want players with high upside you should be looking at high schoolers in the draft? At least with respect to position players.

When did this happen, anyway? Is it a new thing? Should we take it seriously?

I don't actually remember Eddie Collins or Jackie Robinson, a couple of pretty fair college ball players. But I have pretty vivid memories of Dave Winfield and Reggie Jackson and Mike Schmidt. It turned out they had a bit of upside. I also notice that the only man to win seven MVPs went to Arizona State University (just like Reggie.)

Over the last 20 years, MVP and Cy Young awards have been split perfectly between college players and high school players - high school players account for 42 awards, college players for 42. (Oops, that's 21 years.) Hardly a scientific way to look at the issue, I admit. But anyway, if you had a year good enough to win either of these awards, you must have had a bit of potential. And fulfilled it, for a while.

The awards have been evenly split - college players have won 21 MVPs and 21 Cy Youngs - and so have high school players. The Cy Youngs have been split pretty evenly - high school pitchers have won 10 AL awards and 11 NL awards, college pitchers have won 11 AL and 10 NL. High school players have dominated the AL MVP (16 of 21), college players (hello Mr Bonds!) have dominated the NL MVP (also 16 of 21).

Curiously, the most famous Awful MVP Votes of recent years make no impact at all on these numbers. In the AL, George Bell, Ivan Rodriguez, and Justin Morneau probably should have finished behind Alan Trammel, Pedro Martinez, and Derek Jeter - but they're all considered high school players anyway. In the other league, the most famous miscarriages of justice I can think of (1987 and 1992) both saw one college player (Andre Dawson and Terry Pendleton) chosen over a more deserving college player (Ozzie Smith and Bonds.)

Another piece of Accepted Wisdom is that spending a first round pick on a high school pitcher is a little like buying a lottery ticket, only less likely to pay off. Of the high school pitchers to win Cy Youngs during this period, only Chris Carpenter and Roy Halladay were first round picks. I believe Dwight Gooden is the only other high school pitcher taken in the first round to ever win a Cy Young. Glavine and Maddux both went in the second round, out of high school. Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson, who between them account for 13 awards, both went to college.

Anyway, is this really the Accepted Wisdom with respect to position players? The ones who went to college don't have as much upside? Jeff Bagwell turned out to have more upside than anyone imagined, and Ryan Howard's doing OK. I could settle for Jeff Kent and Barry Larkin in the middle of my infield...

Anyway, I'm Just Asking... I'm not a student of the draft by any remote stretch of the imagination.

Although I think I may amuse myself by doing some sniffing around. I'm sure a massive Data Table will result....

Moving along. The subject of Quality Starts came up on the broadcasts, and Pat Tabler remembered the old pitcher (and pitching coach) Stan Williams scoffing at the very concept - 3 runs in 6 innings? that's an ERA of 4.50!

Sigh.

They never complain about a pitcher giving up 6 runs in 5 innings and getting a Win, do they?

For what it's worth, a pitcher's ERA in his Quality Starts is almost always under 2.00 - this year, the Jays starters as a group have an ERA of 1.95 in their Quality Starts. That's 67 starts, and how many times did the starter allow 3 ER in exactly 6 IP? Six times.

Posted by Magpie on Friday, August 17 2007 @ 11:30 PM EDT.

18 August 2007: Just Wondering | 13 comments | Create New Account

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Joe - Saturday, August 18 2007 @ 12:34 AM EDT (#173270) #

I think the reason people often say high school players have more upside is because they're more of an unknown. The error bars are bigger, for the statisticians in the crowd. When the high school player goes to college, he becomes a bit older, a bit wiser, and a bit more of a known quantity. You can't in good conscience project a mediocre college player to become a great major league hitter, but you can do that for high school because "he's got good hands."

That and, I guess that the thinking goes that the "can't miss" phenoms are obvious in high school, so they're snapped up before they ever reach college. Maybe there really are more "can't miss" phenoms in high school; I don't know, 'cause I've never looked. I guess the only way that could be true is if many of them flame out (for whatever reason), because we have to somehow explain the fact that truly great players come equally from both high school and college.

christaylor - Saturday, August 18 2007 @ 09:35 AM EDT (#173276) #

This post got me thinking about this issue - How many great/good college players were passed on until their senior year of college? All of Bonds, Clemens and Johnson were each drafted, but did not sign, three years before the draft where they did sign (or more concisely they were all drafted at 18-19). Essentially, I'm wondering whether the "tools scouts" would generally have cottoned on to the great players who came out of college, without the added statistical evidence. Are the great/good college players all the sort of player went to college for reasons other than they couldn't get drafted at 18?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending "tools scouts" methods of looking for "good faces" or whatever, but I doubt that a player that demonstrates baseball greatness at 27-33 is totally devoid of signs of said greatness at 18... I believe (although I don't know their histories in detail) that each of the three players listed above were recognized as potential greats out of high school but didn't sign for other reasons. Even the not great but good (but statistically very great for a couple seasons) John Olerud was drafted at 18.

Am I missing something obvious? I find this very curious and I'm still left with this question - who are the best college players that went undrafted until their senior year of college?

Magpie - Saturday, August 18 2007 @ 10:45 AM EDT (#173277) #

I dunno. The Giants took Bonds out of high school in 1982, but he went to Arizona and the Pirates picked him in 1985. Did anyone actually use a pick on him in 1983 and 1984? I don't think so. I couldn't find it in the draft section at at baseball-reference.com, which does detail our old friend Mark Hendrickson being drafted out of high school in 1992, out of Washington State in 1993, 1994, and 1996 and out of the NBA in 1997. I could be missing something.

Otherwise - how about Mike Schmidt? Not drafted out of high school, taken in the second round in 1971 out of Ohio University. He was almost 22 by then, and he was in the majors a year later.

Or Big Frank Thomas - also not drafted in high school, and also 21 years old when the White Sox took him out of the Auburn backfield.

A slight - very slight! - correction to the original post. When I said "high school pitchers" had won ten AL Cy Young Awards - it would probably have been more accurate to say "high school players." Bret Saberhagen was a high school shortstop.

Magpie - Saturday, August 18 2007 @ 10:47 AM EDT (#173278) #

Ah - I think I misunderstood what you were saying about Bonds, and went off on a tangent.

Anyway - yes! Mike Schmidt! For sure!.

CaramonLS - Saturday, August 18 2007 @ 11:48 AM EDT (#173279) #

Magpie, how about an ML ERA comparison?

HS vs. College starters.

BulletJayFan - Saturday, August 18 2007 @ 12:04 PM EDT (#173280) #

Of course, Schmidt was a product of a different age. Competition for the next big thing in all sports has moved scouting into almost ridiculous territory. In the US, Freddy Adu was declared as the next big soccer prodigy at the age of 14 (or perhaps earlier, he signed with the MLS at age 14 so no doubt he was identified earlier). Here in Syracuse, our local university's basketball team just recruited a tenth grader. This kid is 15, three years from college and he's already been identified and decided where he wants to play. If someone looks to be the next big thing, chances are he will have been identified before he has a driver's license and multiple teams will be clamoring to get him. Presumably, they will do so before the player gets to college because no one seems to have the ability to resist the almighty dollar. This sort of phenomenon is relatively new, however, as far as sports go. If the same results you cite hold up for the next twenty-one years, then I think it would be safe to assume that the scouting community is, in some measure, covering it's rear end, believing itself not to have allowed anyone to get through. But I would suspect those results will change because of changes in the way players are identified and trained.

Anders - Saturday, August 18 2007 @ 12:44 PM EDT (#173284) #

HS vs. College starters.

I think the thing is, and correct me if I'm wrong, but high school pitchers are less of a successful bet to make the Majors than College pitchers, and that once in the Bigs neither group of pitchers is necessarily better than the other. Drafting a 18 year old kid out of high school vs. a 21 year old kid out of college means that, and while this may sound really obvious, the High School kid has those 3 years of time to get injured/suck/stop pitching. So kids that go to college and blow their arms out are never heard of again, but kids who get drafted and blow their arms out are considered failures. Because really, there are an awful lot of things that can happen to you to mess up your arm if your a pitcher.

Magpie - Saturday, August 18 2007 @ 01:22 PM EDT (#173286) #

how about an ML ERA comparison?

Maybe for first-round picks.... That would call for actual manual data entry, as opposed to gold old copy-and-paste.

I just finished copying and pasting everyone who was drafted as a pitcher from 1965 through 2006 into Excel.The source (baseball-reference.com) only included career W-L, SV, ERA, and WHIP - not, alas, IP and ER. Which means I'd have to add them. And the spreadsheet already goes from Row 3 to Row 22,392.

That doesn't mean that 22,390 pitchers have been drafted over those forty years - lots of and lots of fellows were drafted twice, in high school and college. Several names appear three times. And then there's Mark Hendrickson, of course.

It doesn't even mean that 22,390 draft picks have been used on pitchers. Almost, but not quite. My Blue Jays radar said "Hey, where's Dave Stieb?" Somewhere else - he was drafted as an outfielder, of course. It turns out that some 92 draft picks were used on players who became major league pitchers although they were drafted at another position. Besides the well known examples (Stieb, Wakefield, Percival, Hoffmann) this includes people like Mike Krukow, originally drafted out of high school as a catcher and drafted again three years later as a college pitcher. The Tigers drafted Mark Mulder as a high school first baseman, the Royals drafted Frank Viola as a high school outfielder. College changed their lives!

I haven't yet sorted out how many players have multiple entries - more pressingly, I haven't yet sorted out which guys are college and which are not. That promises to be tedious. But I can tell you right now that of these 22,390 draft picks just 2,865 actually pitched in the majors (at this stage, remember, Mark Hendrickson counts six times). And probably quite a few of them pitched as much in the majors as Frank Menechino.

Bill James said in an interview a few years back:

There are a hundred pitchers in the minor leagues today who are going to be superstars if they don't hurt their arms. The problem is, 98 of them are going to hurt their arms. At least 98 of them.

I always understood that to be the heart of the argument against using a high pick on a high school pitcher. A pitcher who's made it to college has already passed partway through that relentless gauntlet.

Chuck - Saturday, August 18 2007 @ 02:01 PM EDT (#173290) #

I always understood that to be the heart of the argument against using a high pick on a high school pitcher. A pitcher who's made it to college has already passed partway through that relentless gauntlet.

Right. On someone else's dime, they proved they could survive their early 20's.

Jim - Sunday, August 19 2007 @ 12:09 PM EDT (#173310) #

A pitcher who's made it to college has already passed partway through that relentless gauntlet.

It is probably more complicated that that. Look at what pitching at Rice has done to a lot of promising arms.

Maybe being a professional system where they protect your arm is better then being at a college program where the coach cares more about winning then you having TJ surgery?

FranklyScarlet - Sunday, August 19 2007 @ 12:34 PM EDT (#173311) #

Tim Wakefield was asked in college to 'try pitching' since his coach observed he couldn't hit college pitching.

A great article on the injuries to pitchers in the Major Leagues was in the NYTimes a couple of months ago. It was called My Right Arm.

And, since I don't know where else to post this:

Boston is reporting that Kevin Cash will catch Tavarez this afternoon and Wakefield tomorrow. Mirabelli went down (DL) with a calf sprain Friday and Cash was summoned to Fenway. He has some experience catching the knuckleballers, with 2 of them (Zink and Barnes) in the Sox system.

Mike Green - Wednesday, August 22 2007 @ 10:17 AM EDT (#173392) #

Jim Callis points out that the Tigers will have 4 option years with Porcello from 2008-11. His comment that the Tigers will not likely need an option year in 2012 for him is open to some question, as pitcher health is always in issue and it does often end up taking a number of years to sort these things out, as we know all too well here...

18 August 2007: Just Wondering | 13 comments | Create New Account

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