All Draft Picks Are Worthless?

[Clay Dreslough]

Very interesting "Anti-Moneyball" argument, essentially saying the GMs should be ignoring draft picks and just signing free agents:

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slu...del&type=story

Clay

[boomboom]

i do that in BMO all the time....

[SFSteveG]

That's amazing. I never really realized how much draftees got for being picked high. Why even choose to play that lottery at all unless you thought you had a star you could grab with two hands?

[hawkeye3200]

That's an interesting read. I still think the Moneyball method of working market inefficiencies and making illegal agreements with players to sign for less (i.e. Jeremy Brown in the book) works better...

[Paul Drye]

I'd want to see that study run again with somewhat less subjective ways of judging a players' value before I'd believe it.

I can also think of two flaws in the argument. One is that if you do pick a star or good player, you're going to get another 1st round draft pick in compensation about eight or nine years later when he leaves in free agency. Over time this turns into a pipeline that gives you a couple of 1st rounders most years, rather than one. If you sign a free agent, you get fewer kicks at the can and there's a cost to that.

The other is that he's assuming that all free agents signed continue to perform at the level they did before they were signed, which is obviously not true. Instead of paying $5-7 million for a free agent "Good" player, a team has to pay -- say -- $10-14 million because (I'm guessing here) 50% of middling free agents go bad not long after they're signed. His argument only holds if none of them do, and I think we'll all agree that even if my guess of 50% is too low, it's certainly not as high as 100% either.

There's also the side issue that comparing draft picks from 1986 on may not be wise. I'd argue that we're considerably better at picking high round winners now than we were 20 years ago. For example, we know that you'd be pretty stupid to draft a high school catcher or, to a lesser extent, high school pitcher with a high pick. By including picks made back when we didn't know this, he's making picks made now look less valuable than they are.