Drafting is Hard, Then It Becomes Near Impossible

I'm stealing Shankbone's favorite phrase (Drafting is Hard) for the title of this post.

Below is the response I gave to someone talking about the Giants poor draft record, plus changes...

ogc big picture thoughts

I'm getting really sick and tired hearing about how poorly the Giants draft.  But I haven't reached a point where I can say for certain that the Giants under Sabean has been good.

However, analyzing the expected success rate for all first round picks under Sabean, including supplemental - which likely depresses his success rate, as I don't think any of his was a success, i.e. finding a good player, with maybe Crick the only one to contend for that designation - I added up the probabilities of success over his most of his tenure, up to 2010, and they summed to finding 2.3 good players with all those 28 first round picks, and in total, he found 4, Cain, Lincecum, Bumgarner, Posey. So there's that.

And out of the players from 2011 on, Crick, Panik, Stratton, Arroyo, Beede, Shaw, Bickford, Ramos, and Bart are still on the clock for him.  They roughly add to 1.0, so even if they all fail, the final tally for Sabean's first round picks would be this:  expected to find 3.3 good players, found 4.  And I think it looks good for adding one more good player (Bart) with potential for another (Ramos), and I would not count out Panik, Beede, or Shaw yet either.

Drafting is the Hardest Thing in Baseball

What people don't understand is that drafting in baseball is extremely hard. Bad hitters don't get hits more than 20% (.200, or roughly the Mendoza Line) of the time, but 20% hit rate for finding good players in the first round would be considered extremely good for most first round picks: only the first four picks overall has a success rate of 20% or higher for finding a good player, and drops to 7% by the end of the first round.

So poor drafting is actually a given for any team. The odds are totally against you, so it's a numbers game that a baseball team has to play, because it's the only way to find talent. And this is why teams tank, the odds of finding a good player is exponentially better when you pick with a top 5 pick overall (roughly 3-4 times better odds Top 5 vs. picks 21-30.

The key is whether your team find enough players through the draft, while you are losing, to be competitive in the future. Sabean did that, making the team competitive starting in 2009.

The Draft Does Its Job

The draft is structured to cripple competitive teams by making it extremely hard to find a good baseball player. The odds is roughly 7% chance of finding a good player when you are playoff competitive (picks 21-30), which means that, on average, you find one good player every 14 drafts. Your second round pick is down to around 4%, or one every 25 drafts. With those odds, a competitive team's whole draft (all 40 rounds) has around 15-16% chance (guess-timate on my part, until I do further draft pick analysis, but I feel good about this) of finding a good player, which means you find a good player every 6-7 seasons.

Prospects Need Time to Develop

Then, on top of that, that player, even the #1 pick overall, needs time in the minors. Some are fast (Giants been good there, Cain, Lincecum, Posey, Bumgarner, Belt took less than 3 years, and Bart looks like he'll be quick too), but most prospects usually need 4-6 years to have that breakout MLB season. So, on top of waiting 6-7 years (say, 3-4 year on average; and there's still significant odds that after 6-7 years, you haven't found anyone and it's not abnormal) to find that one good player, you need to wait 4-6 years for him to break out.

Which means that on average, once you become a competitive team, it could take 7-10 years, on average, for a good player via the draft to matriculate, and up to 13 years for it to happen and still be an expected result.  So it is very possible that a team is not competitive anymore by the time their next good player matriculates from the draft.

Sabean's Clock Ticking But Not Out Yet

So we can't say whether Sabean was good or bad right now, with the draft, after they became competitive in 2009.  With competitive drafts counting starting in 2010, now it is probably down to Panik, Suarez, Mac, Shaw, Ramos, and Bart (Hjelle too?).  Beede restarted his prospect-hood as well, so we'll see there as well, and Arroyo, Stratton, and Crick counts too.

If Ramos, who is 19 YO now, can break out in 2022, it would be within norms for baseball, as it would take the Giants 12 years to find that one good player, since the start of their competitive period.

Why It's Beyond Hasty to Declare Anything Right Now

And it would take a long while to make any type of determination on what a player is.  Panik has been around, but he's only at 7.0 bWAR after 2018, and my definition of good are players with at least 18.0 bWAR.  So it could be another 4-5 years before we can say whether he is or isn't.  Stratton looked good after 2017, at 1.5 bWAR after 10 starts and a few relief appearances (roughly 3-4 bWAR seasonal rate), and although he's back to 0.4, if he can find that steady rhythm that he had in 2017, he could reach good status in 6-8 seasons. 

Even more so for Ramos, he could have a great year in 2022, but sputter like Panik has.  We might not be able to say, by definition, either way until 2028-2030, whether he's good or not.

And Bart looks close to being that one good player for the competitive period.  Although he's a high pick, and technically, not selected with a pick while they were competitive (#2 is obvious a great pick position), I view the clock as ticking the moment the Giants started selecting in the draft after becoming competitive, which means starting with the 2010 Draft.  In addition, it is not like the #2 pick is a gimme - even that only has 30% odds of being a good player, the vast majority of them were not good (though another 19% were very useful, with 9-17.9 bWAR).

Yet, there are a lot of people crapping all over the Giants draft results, even though things are still unsettled, and could be open to change for another decade.

Most Team Draft Poorly

Drafting is hard, almost all teams draft poorly, and it's hard to determine whether it's luck or actual skill.  And even the draft if not enough to be the difference between struggling to win and becoming competitive. 

The difference is whether the GM can pull together enough of that, plus some good trades, some good signings, some good dumpster diving, just to get competitive.  Then once a team is competitive, the timer is ticking away their competitive lifespan, even more rapidly, because it's very hard to find another good player in the draft once you become competitive.  Hopefully you can see this from the above.