As we noted before the draft is one of those places baseball works against you. You do well you draft lower and if you draft lower you get worse players. It's obviously very specific to player but in general your first pick is likely a good useful player for several years, the next few picks likely long term usable players, the next few (say we're at like 5-15) at least role players. Then we're already into guys most likely to barely make an impact. And we're not even in the second round yet.
Take the very first Nationals draft - the Zimmerman one - which was a LOADED draft that is one of the best drafts in the past 40 years. What do we see in picks 15-30? Ellsbury is the best guys there. Coly Rasmus. Matt Garza and Cliff Pennington. But then... Joey Devine. Chris Volstad. John Mayberry. That's not even halfway through. Three guys didn't make the majors. (which in itself is pretty good actually) 4 more had negative WARs in their career. So as many had any sort of MLB career that you might remember them as had no or a terrible and short career. And this is the back end of the FIRST round.
Anyway the point is the when the Nats started drafting they had it a lot easier. 4th in a loaded 2005 got them Zimm. A surprise 81-81 record got them a middling pick and Chris Marrero. Then they'd pull Detwiler in the first next - disappointing - and would waste a pick on Aaron Crow in 2008 who they wouldn't sign. But both those picks were 5-10 (6 and 9 actually) and again - the expectation is "useful role player" there. So not great work but not missing out on too much.
And by then they'd be bad enough to get back to back #1 picks right when supposed generational talent showed up. Strasburg and Bryce. The number 2 picks each year? Dustin Ackley and Jameson Taillon. It matters getting that first pick. The higher the better. And Rizzo, now in complete control of the draft, knew that so he adopted a strategy. Pick guys that drop. Maybe because of injury, maybe because of something else but draft guys who talent wise would be higher. Why? Because every pick is a gamble and you might as well bet on the best talent. In 2011 with pick 6 that gamble paid off with Anthony Rendon. In 2012 as well with Lucas Giolito with 16. Both guys were seen as #1 type talent who were injury risks. Tough to take at #1 but a steal at anything past 3 imo. That's an impressive run of first round picks.
In 2013 they lost their pick to sign Rafeal Soriano. But in 2014 did the same thing and pulled in Erick Fedde. Not at the same level but when you are picking 18 what they got isn't bad. 2015 was lost again - but for Max. 2016 they drafted Kieboom - a kid they had their eyes on for years, enough so they drafted his brother and Dane Dunning. So things were going pretty well but signing FAs cost them draft picks and meant that when they did pick they had to count. These guys were pretty good but they weren't getting the same quality as before.
Then the strategy backfired. Seth Romero - dropped because of some, let's say, attitude issues -was picked up by the Nats in 2017. He hasn't gotten his head on straight and his pitching has followed. Mason Denaburg, dealing with a bicep injury, was drafted in 2018 when he dropped to the Nats. He hasn't been able to stay healthy. In 2019 they chose Jackson Rutledge who was fantastic as a sophomore at a JC but was only at the junior college because of a hip injury as a freshman at Arkansas. He got injured this season.
To recap 2009-2012 - no misses. Two number ones help of course, but Rendon and Giolito both developed. Even if only used for trade bait that's something and you can trade a Giolito when you are working off a winning streak like this.
2013-2019 - two years without picks, a couple decent picks when you had a chance but you probably traded away the best one, then what looks like it might be three straight misses. Admittedly we're still early on picks as far back as 2017 (really right now is when we should see 16/17 start to break in) but the early returns aren't great.
And while the strategy was falling apart with the first round picks, something worse was going on in the deeper rounds. In the early year the Nats were able to pull a couple major league players out of these rounds every year. Maybe not something great but something useful. From 2007 on they drafted in the later rounds :
- 2007 - ZNN, Souza, Norris
- 2008 - Espinosa, Milone
- 2009 - Storen, MAT, Karns
- 2010 - Solis, Cole, Grace, Barrett, Ray
- 2011 - Meyer, Goodwin
Not all great but you need players to fill a roster. You need prospects like Meyer and Norris and Karns to develop and deal.
After 2011 though the well goes dry fast, Pivetta being the best pick over the course of several seasons
- 2012 - no one.
- 2013 - Pivetta, Voth
- 2014 - no one
- 2015 - Schrock, Taylor Hearn, Glover
The Nats weren't messing up the first round picks yet but underneath they had nothing. These are the guys that would be early career players on the Nats in 2020, 2021 and there is no one there. Even if they weren't dealt... maybe Pivetta is with Ross and Fedde fighting for a spot?
2016 would be better, Kieboom, Dunning, Neuse, Luzardo, Dan Johnson, Barrera, would all be interesting enough to be dealt and/or good enough to make the majors. But since then nothing new. Again its early but you like at least one surprise early showing ever few years or so. Glover was drafted in 15 and pitched in 16. ZNN drafted in 2007 and pitching in 2009.
To wrap this all up the Nats were one of the best drafting team in baseball from 2007-2012. Yes part of that was having Stras and Bryce fall into their laps, but they also took gambles that worked out and pulled in about 3 major leaguers a year from the later rounds. It takes about 4-5 years for players to rise up out of the minors so you can imagine if you do that for 5 seasons how you'd end up with a top system even before you consider trade returns and international prospects.
But they couldn't keep the first round strategy working for more than a couple picks and from 2012 to 2015 they had a drought of finding guys in the rest of the draft. It happens but when you couple it with the fact you were now trading out instead of in, the minors deplete fairly rapidly. The one time the Nats did have a decent draft, in 2016, it had to nearly be turned around immediately for trades because there was nothing else in the system.
The Nats drafting acumen failed them at an inopportune time (right at the end of the window when they'd want to trade for players) and it failed them repeatedly. 1-2 years happen, 3-4 and you messed up. The Nats messed up. And with the few trades the did make for young talent being misses as well the Nats minor leagues were behind the 8 ball. Only international signings could save them but as you'll see that's a bad gamble and even coming up with a Soto couldn't do it.
16 comments:
This has been a great series, and I really appreciate your analysis. You've done a great job putting everything into perspective. The club really has made some missteps recently, and this year the bill came due.
But I do have two minor criticisms of this post. First, you don't mention the major shift in the draft rules in 2012. Before that year, teams could basically spend whatever they wanted for each draft pick, allowing the Nats to overpay for lower draft picks that had potential but were holding out for more $. But since 2012, teams have been limited in how much they could spend, and those limits were more stringent for teams that had better records the previous year or who had signed free agents. Which brings me to my next point . . .
From 2012 through 2020, the Nats have had particularly bad draft positioning and bonus allotments. I don't have the time to run the numbers, but I'd bet that every other team had better draft positioning on average during that time frame. That's because the Nats never had a reset year. As a fan, I'm good with that, but it does make the environment more challenging. As a good comparator, in 2016 the Nats probably had their best opportunity with 2 comp picks and more money than usual, and they had an excellent draft.
Now, this doesn't completely excuse things. Other teams, especially the Dodgers, have done better while picking in slots 20-30. And recent first round picks have been very disappointing, aside from Cavalli (and he's one injury away from joining those). So, overall, I agree with you. I just don't think it's quite as bad as the results would indicate, if you consider the context.
I can't remember where I saw it, but there was an analysis that somebody did that basically demonstrated the best way to guarantee sustained success for a ballclub is to hire lots of scouts. Right now a lot of teams are downsizing their scouting departments in favor of analytics, but there's simply no way to find "diamonds in the rough" without having people in the field. It's nearly impossible to say whether a kid with a 1.200 OPS in upstate New York is better than a kid with a .900 OPS as a junior at Vanderbilt, but scouts can look at those players with the "eye" test and generally confirm that the kid from Vandy is way better than the kid in Genessee County playing Legion ball.
As a guy known as a "scount's GM", you'd think Rizzo would be investing heavily in his scouting department. You could hire 10 scouts for the same amount of money that you put into Harrison this year, the ROI has to be there I gotta think. And just because you invest in scouting doesn't mean you have to divest from analytics, the best clubs are doing both. Case and point: the Tampa Bay Rays
I asked this in the past, but I still can't tell - is the whiff in Player Development or in Scouting?
Feel like the answer is both, with Scouting leading the way here. Would love to shake up our Scouting team and bring in one of the rising stars for the perennially good-while-still-competing farm programs (SF, STL, TB).
More on Corbin:
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/a-potential-fix-for-patrick-corbin/
We know from reports that the Nats made front office cuts after the 2020 season, including scouts. Getting specific baseball operations information from the team isn't easy, though. You'd think you were dealing with Brezhnev's Kremlin.
But Rizzo let the cat poke its head and paws out of the bag in December:
"Unfortunately, we had some casualties in the scouting sector of the organization, not as big in others because we have a very small scouting staff to begin with."
Over to you, @Cautiously Pessimistic and @Anonymous 11:41
Oh man, SM, why'd you have to go and surface that. Ignorance can be bliss
I saw that same "scouting means wins" piece years ago. A few weeks ago I found a scouting website that shows how many scouts are employed by which club, and plotted those numbers against the average ranking of their farm systems. There's a pretty clear correlation:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSY0EXu_IQsHqxjaPRxb_C2vv0p5eb4gAgmqKqHGt-E0cfxvsgi_x1Fl9MYZrxIJkCujVvtw7ZEYq76/pubchart?oid=396945712&format=interactive
source data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_5pu3PHcimWeuXSoGy8w4ej2y5TCQqbttkyp83qmdNU/edit?usp=sharing
Also, given that there are fewer affiliated minor leagues now, there are going to be a lot more summer leagues, semi-pro and other places to look for talent. Scouts are cheap, and it's a simple, great way to get more players.
@Harper -
This really is a great series, and I know there's at least one more installment, but my biggest takeaway so far has just been how luck driven a lot of these things are.
Sometimes, you can mutter something about good or bad process, and try to take credit or assign blame, but almost all of these things are partly luck and some of them are just 100% straight chance, for good or for ill.
All those FAs turning down our offers. Incredible. A couple offers were priced so that we shouldn't be surprised (eg Desmond), and I guess you could credit Rizzo and the Lerners for not getting carried away and getting their egos attached to any one deal, but it was just an incredible run of good fortune that is almost completely outside the team's control.
And then Stras and Harper - we had two 1-1 picks and they were the second and sixth best 1-1s since 2000. A team with two first overall picks during that span will only get as many combined WAR as we did one time in twenty.
On the flip side, Eaton's injury cost us a ton of value. Trea caught super 2 status by a single day. (I mean, good for him and good on the Nats for not gaming those rules as hard as a lot of teams, but I'm just talking good/bad luck and that increased the cost of his rookie deal by almost $20M dollars. Over one day.) Storen actually being the rare reliever who can't handle the team bringing in a new closer. Maybe some of that isn't pure luck, but it's mostly luck.
More recently, missing on Romero, Denaburg and Rutledge in a row kills, when even highest-risk/highest-reward back-end first rounders should hit more often than one in three.
(Romero did throw 5 shutout innings with 9 Ks, 2 hits and 1 walk yesterday in AAA. And maybe Rutledge's injury problems are fixable, so it's not time to zero out the value on them just yet. But quite obviously, those are three picks worth less today than when they were drafted, so results-wise they were clearly bad choices.)
So looking at these drafts, I don't really know how to rate Rizzo and the team (or how to compare their good and bad years) because I don't really know any other teams' systems enough to know what "normal" variance looks like.
Take 2017. Is that a bad draft? Aside from Romero, we got Crowe in round 2 (who was half of the trade for Bell and Pittsburgh is currently giving him major league innings in the hopes he can become a backend starter), Kyle Johnston in the 6th (who got us Hudson from Toronto for the world series run), and Klobosits (who is currently getting a shot in our bullpen after pitching 32 innings of <1 ERA relief in the high minors this year). Plus 5 or 6 guys who are still in the system and looking OK, but are admittedly very unlikely to make the next step and shouldn't really be considered prospects at this point.
Now, that's objectively not a great draft, especially if Romero remains a miss, but in terms of rounds 2+, that doesn't seem that far from expectations. Maybe middle of the pack?
(2018 looks much worse. After the typical risk-on play in the first round with Denaburg, all I'm seeing is that we kicked Fletcher (14th round) with another couple similarly fringe prospects for Elias and Strickland in 2019 (a pair that did NOT help us), and then it's like three or four fringy prospects, the best of which is Tim Cate. So, yes, a very very weak draft. But it's also the draft class that was probably most impacted by the lost covid season, so who knows how we should be judging these guys' development.)
Anyway, it's just something I think we should keep in mind when we talk about the team's scouting prowess or development problems as an organization. We're only are able to see a handful of data points and there's nothing easier for the human mind than to find patterns when they aren't really there.
You know, I often wonder why in baseball you can’t trade picks like they do in NFL and NBA. I actually think it would add a lot to the trade deadline deals. Imagine a team dumping a couple of prospects and a bunch of first rounders for pieces at the deadline. I actually think it would cool. I get some farm systems would be Mordor-esque barren if that were allowed. But it would be fun. Nats could’ve picked up an additional first rounder for Turner probably. Am I wrong in thinking this is not allowed by MLB? And if so, why?
I think the hard part with trading picks is that it would be high risk for a receiving team, and therefore not very valuable in a trade. There are 40 rounds of the draft in normal years, meaning you could fill an entire 40-man roster with just one year. Contrast that to the NFL where there's only 7 rounds or the NBA where there's only 2, and you can see the value that a single pick provides compared to the size of your roster.
Now if you could guarantee a top 5 pick? Then your know you're likely getting MLB talent. Anything beyond that and it becomes a crapshoot. You're better off getting a prospect already playing pro ball that you can better assess via scouting to know if they can make the big leagues
@CP
Good point. Wasn’t thinking about the depth of the draft. I guess I just feel like there’s good number of pretty good players. Feels like if a team was truly rebuilding, and if there’s a deep draft class, seems like a cheap way to inject the farm system with early round picks. For a farm system I just get the feeling that the deeper you can fill that system with early round picks you set up a good team. Kind of a shotgun type approach. But I guess just trading for low minors prospects is close to the same thing. The Marlins would have like 5 first rounders every year. They seem like the type of club that would do something like that. At least it would give the fans something to be excited about one day each year. Marlins fans NEVER have a day to be excited. Sorry to any Marlins fans that may read this, not trying to throw shade, I remember watching every game of the Nats 100 loss seasons and thinking “eventually they’ll figure something out”
ps: god I can’t believe I was excited about Lastings Milledge and Elijah Dukes. Man those were tough times
But the sound off their bats in spring training was so impressive…….
MH here:
Seems really stupid to cut your scouting department. They don't make that much money and if they get you a few young controllable players, they are more than worth the investment. Shaking my head--pinching pennies costs you money. The model should be to be somewhere in between what LA does (scouting AND spending) and what Oakland does (scouting but having to always sell off to keep the budget under tight control).
Seems like the biggest difference between 2009 rebuild and 2021 rebuild is MASN revenue, no?
I really want to thank Dr Emu for saving my marriage. My wife really treated me badly and left home for almost 3 month this got me sick and confused. Then I told my friend about how my wife has changed towards me. Then she told me to contact Dr Emu that he will help me bring back my wife and change her back to a good woman. I never believed in all this but I gave it a try. Dr Emu casted a spell of return of love on her, and my wife came back home for forgiveness and today we are happy again. If you are going through any relationship stress or you want back your Ex or Divorce husband you can contact his whatsapp +2347012841542 or email emutemple@gmail.com website: Https://emutemple.wordpress.com/
Post a Comment