How The Braves Front Office Was Worth 3 Wins on Draft Day

The MLB Rule 4 draft was last week, and with it came a new crop of prospects, with their fun radar gun readings and YouTube channels full of sweet swings. But as with any draft, they came also with a whole host of questions. Being the numbers-oriented cynic that I am, I dove into things to figure out just how successful these new draftees (kids) are going to be. The short answer? A lot of first rounders turn out to be busts.

But there’s an interesting corollary here: the overall strategy at the top of the draft seems to be shifting a bit. Teams seem to be valuing prospects’ “signability” more and more. Organizations at the top of the draft are essentially trading down to select multiple top 20 talents, rather than a top 5 talent and then a top 40 talent. (Bill Belichick watched this draft with pride.)

Consider: the Reds saved about a million dollars by selecting Nick Senzel in the number two slot. They then reallocated that money to acquire more premium expensive talent later in the draft. The Reds beat writers called this the Houston Astros’ draft model. The Braves did basically the same thing by picking Ian Anderson, reportedly saving nearly $3 Million below slot with him, and then picking more high schoolers with their 40^th and 44^th overall selections.

The idea makes sense: Get three top 20 talents, instead of just one top 20 talent. Ok, sure—but does that work? By loading up on top 20 guys, aren’t you missing out on the top 5 guys? Those top 5 guys sure do seem fun…

Well. I happen to be in possession of some data that will hopefully give us an answer. Compiled from 2000-2010, this data comes from a bygone era before the slot system came into existence. Teams had different financial incentives, and back then, probably took the best players available at the top of the draft more so than they do now.

I’ll spare the full details since you can find them in my recent post “Success Rate of MLB Draft by Slot”, but know that it basically comes down to the two charts below. (Note: I extended the data set in order to include the top 45 picks, instead of the just the top 30.)

I broke things down into 5 pick slots to gain some insight into the success/value of each of the picks.  The idea is that these 5 pick slots tell us the general success rate of picks in that range. It’s probably easier with a chart…

So basically the Braves used to go for Bucket 1:

1. One top 5 pick +
2. One top 40 pick +
3. One top 45 pick

To something closer to Bucket 2:

1. Three top 20 picks

I averaged the rate of success for these buckets and came up with the following two charts, which indicate that the Braves decision to acquire top 20 picks was a good idea by about 7%.

So the Braves turned a 77% chance of a bust on all three picks into a 70% chance of a bust on all three picks. Wow, this really underscores how many of these picks turn out to be busts…

Since we here in the baseball analysis community are prone to turn things into WAR and I feel the need to delve into the idea of a fractional player, let’s do a little more fun stuff with math.

Since the Braves had 3 picks, we can easily multiply each of the percentages laid out above by 3 to find the number of players that will end up that way. (It’s math, just trust me.) Then, since we have the rough WAR of each of those buckets, we can estimate the WAR of those top 3 picks across the first 6 years of team control.

So by “trading back” or simply using their pool allotment more effectively, the Braves earned themselves roughly 2.5 wins. There’s still a 70% chance that none of these guys works out, but that’s OK.  At least we have some empirical evidence that the Braves front office is making the right baseball decisions.

-Sean Morash