It
is about time someone does a well conducted study of how valuable each Scoresheet draft pick is. I have made some studies
which give some clue about the relative worth of some picks:
Analysis of First Round Picks
Start-up Draft Study
and
possibly the most direct study: When Stars Get Hitched
Draft
pick values have been discussed on mcscoresheet and scoresheet-talk, but I wasn’t able to pinpoint the threads of those discussions.
We
here is another small study which examines a part of this question:
As
more and more leagues are private and have diverging methods of drafting, the value of particular picks changes. In the standard
3 stage mail in draft list draft, a round 25 pick is significantly more valuable than a round 23 or 24 pick, because a few
weeks of spring training and player acquisitions will have transpired between those picks giving us better information on
who is healthy and who is more likely to start the season with the big club. Neither of my leagues use mail-in drafts anymore.
The
standard might now be the web based draft. There is no three week break between phases, it is one continuous draft finishing
shortly before the start of the season. As the latter picks are made with increased spring training and player movement information,
I was wondering if the value of latter picks are actually higher than earlier picks at some point in the draft. Indeed, the
number of surprisingly good late picks in my web-draft league bares that out. I asked the members of mcscoresheet and scoresheet-talk, if they noticed the same phenomenon, but only received two responses. Both upon quick observation more or less had the same
result as I.
Looking
at my web league more carefully, I discovered there wasn’t a significant difference between each teams’ 23-27
picks and their 28-35 picks. Due to the number of prospects protected, these groups represented almost exactly the same number
of players. I semi-randomly wrote down the list of players drafted in the two groups side by side. Where one was significantly
more valuable than the other at this point in the season early in the fourth week of May, I gave a “win”. If I
had trouble deciding who was more valuable, I gave a “tie”. The bottom picks had 19 “wins”. The players
from the preceding 5 rounds had 20 “wins”. Were there more lopsided wins by one group than the other? It is more
difficult to stay objective with that type of analysis. However, I’d say there were about an equal number of big wins
on either side – Buck, Carmona, Okajima, and Byrd for the bottom picks; Gaudin, Garko, Joe Kennedy, and Accardo for
the mid 20s picks.
I’m
sure results in most leagues wouldn’t be this precisely even. Gaudin and Buck may be the best bargains of this entire
group, yet, in my other league Buck was a protected rookie, while Gaudin wasn’t taken until the May draft. And, this
being the end of May, who knows what value all of these players will have in September?
I
apologize for the inconclusiveness of this study, but it may be worthwhile enough to keep in mind at the negotiation table.
