Giants 2015 First Round Pick: RHP Phil Bickford

For their first pick of the 2015 draft, the Giants selected RHP Phil Bickford.  I'm going to be compiling information on him from Baggarly's BA and Merc article, CSNBA Staff report, and bits and pieces from various mocks I've been collecting (BA, FG, MLB.com).

The CSN report was nicely done, covering all the essentials (saves me the job of finding these readily available info elsewhere), so I will quote it here:

Bickford was ranked No. 27 on Baseball America's Top 500 Draft Prospects. 

Two years ago, Bickford was selected with the No. 10 pick by the Toronto Blue Jays out of Westlake Village (Calif.) Oaks Christian High School. Toronto was unable to sign him and he instead went to Cal State Fullerton for his freshman year. 

After one season at CSU Fullerton where he went 6-3 with a 2.13 ERA and posted 74 strikeouts in 76 innings pitched, Bickford transferred to the College of Southern Nevada to become draft eligible for 2015.

In his one year at Southern Nevada, Bickford went 9-1 with a 1.45 ERA and struck out 166 batters compared to only 21 walks in 86.2 innings pitched.

MLB.com ranked him #21, Minor League Ball's Garrioch ranked him #42, Fangraph's McDaniels ranked him #25 in his draftboard.

FYI, Baggarly has a great article regarding Barr's successes in filling out our infield with draft picks.   I highly recommend a read.

Your 2015 Giants Draft

I try to write about the draft every season.  Of course, it's important to the team to find good players, so that this dynasty can continue.  I also have a strong interest because of my draft study that I did long ago.  And, really, after the excitement of the Lincecum draft, listening to the broadcast over the internet, wondering whether he would fall to us or not, I got hooked.  Of course, that was a rare one, you really need a high pick to hope to have such an experience, and all you need is one or more teams going off mock to really mix things up, and make a mock, well, mockable.

I've gotten more involved over the years.  First, of course, I read the reports, saw the mocks.  Then I started tracking the names of players, their positions, and the various mocks by writing them down on paper.  Now I create spreadsheets so that I can view the evolution of how some players rise up the mocks, and others fall out of the first round.

There are usually some Giants rumors, but most seems to be off.  But you never know, the rumor could have been right, but the player got plucked before the Giants could pick the player.  Still, I've only seen one rumor come to fruition, Kiley McDaniels was the only draft expert to note that the Giants were interested in Christian Arroyo.

So my philosophy for the draft is to have some ideas who the better prospects are, particularly in the range where the Giants are selecting, and just follow along.  I will fall in love with some prospects, like Tuki and Grant Holmes (not the Dodgers!), but not get too hung up, as the Giants will go their own way, and, so far, successfully so.

2015 Giants: May PQS

This post has the Giants Pure Quality Start scores for the month of May 2015, PQS as defined in Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster annual book and they published the details here (unfortunately, they removed the article; this link gets you at least to the PQS definition, read down to middle for details). I wrote on this first in 2006 (wow, 10th year of this!) and have compiled their stats on a regular basis, so I'm continuing it this season for continuity and historical comparison (there is the "PQS" label that you can click to see the old posts on this). Regular readers can skip to the next section.

This is the Quality Start with a sabermetric DIPS twist, and it gets really easy to calculate once you get used to it. I don't think it's the end all or be all, but then nothing really is that. It is, as I like to say, another piece of the puzzle. A dominating start is scored a 4 or 5 and a disaster start is scored a 0 or 1. DOM% is the percentage of starts that are dominating, DIS% is the percentage of starts that are disasters (any start under 5.0 IP is automatically a 0, or disaster).