Kerry's Calculus Baseball's Amateur Draft:  An Historical Series Part Three:  High School vs. College

In part two of the amateur draft series we saw how first round draft picks have stacked up over the years--the short story is that roughly 70% of these players have been journeymen or worse (mostly worse).  In other words, only 30% of the players chosen in the first round of the amateur draft over the years--excluding recent drafts which could be expected to depress the numbers while minor league development continued--have been starting/contributing level ballplayers or better at the big league level.  

In part three, we'll break down the first round picks--pitchers and position players, college players and high schoolers...does it matter where these guys come from?  We hinted at the answer to this question in part one of the series; we'll now dig deeper.

As you may recall from part one, the early years of the draft were dominated by the selection of high school players and, after 1980, the choices became much more equally divided and have stayed that way, a few recent rumblings to the contrary notwithstanding.  Table 1, lifted directly from part one of the series, clearly displays this point:

Table 1: First Round Draft Picks, 1965-2001

But part one didn't assess the relative success or failure of high school/college players in anything more than a vague, anecdotal manner.  It's time to take a more objective, comprehensive view.

A Refresher Course

This series on the amateur draft was inspired by several articles published on a number of Web sites that discussed the perceived lack of recent success of pitchers drafted directly out of high school.  I combed through every first round pick and started with a more general principle--before breaking players down into high school or college draftees, before distinguishing pitchers from position players--and divided players into five categories which I laid out in part two.  As a reminder, those categories are:

0 = Player never reached the major leagues

1 = Player had a "cup of coffee" in the majors

2 = Player was a major league "journeyman"

3 = Player was a starting position player or "contributing" pitcher at the major league level

4 =  Player was a "star" at the major league level

(For a more detailed explanation of these categories, see part two of this series.)

The final tally was:

Table 2: First Round Draft Picks, 1965-2001

By dropping the drafts after 1994 to account for the fact that many players drafted more recently could still be expected to change categories before concluding their careers, we were left with the following modified results:

Table 3: First Round Draft Picks, 1965-1994

That's the general population.  How do things look after we break them down a bit?

High School vs. College

How do high school and college draftees spec out?  The following table provides a year-by-year look beginning with the draft's inception in 1965.

Table 4: First Round Draft Picks, 1965-2001

(The first two columns after the year refer to the total number of high school and college players drafted in a given season.  The following columns refer to the qualitative categories.  So, for instance, HS0 indicates high school draftees who never reached the big leagues, C0 indicates college draftees who never reached the big leagues, and so on.)

Note that 46.2% of the high school sample has never played a game in the big leagues.  Another 15% of high school draftees fall into the cup of coffee category and 17.5% are journeyman.  Tally that up and you'll find that nearly 79% of first round high school draft picks have had no meaningful impact at the big league level.  Just under 17% fall into the contributing/starter category and barely 4% are stars.

On the college side, the numbers are markedly better.  Just under 32% have never reached the big leagues, while about 17% have had a cup of coffee, 21% are journeyman.  22% are contributors/starters and 8% are stars.

Now, as was the case last time, the numbers above may be skewed by the inclusion of recent drafts, so let's do what we did in part two and drop the post-1994 drafts out of the analysis and see how that impacts the totals.

Table 5: First Round Draft Picks, 1965-1994

As expected, the numbers have shifted to the right somewhat, but that holds for both high school and college draftees, so the overall disparity is essentially unchanged:  Approximately 75% of the high school first round draftees from 1965-94 have had no practical impact at the big league level.  You'll recall that the number for the general population was around 70%, so college players will clearly be lower...and our data confirms that.  Around 66% of the college players fall into the inconsequential pool, nearly 10 percentage points lower than the high school rate.  Also, while the rate at the starter/contributor level isn't dramatically different (24% for college players, 20% for high schoolers), the star incidence per player drafted is roughly twice as high for college players as high school players--about 10% to 5% of the samples respectively.

Pitchers vs. Position Players

Again, part of the motivation for this series of articles stemmed from the preceding discussion about high school pitchers, so it's incumbent upon me to break the sample down further and investigate whether the aforementioned distinction between high school and college draftees holds for pitchers and position players.  Let's take a look at each.

Table 6:  First Round Pitcher Draft Picks, 1965-2001

Once again, let's modify the totals so they end with the 1994 draft:

Table 7:  First Round Pitcher Draft Picks, 1965-1994

These percentages look similar to those of the general sample, but are a bit higher in the left-hand columns.  First round pitchers drafted out of high school have fallen into the inconsequential trio of classifications about 79% of the time.  18% are contributing level pitchers and just over 2%--a grand total of four pitchers out of 169 first rounders drafted directly from high school from 1965 through 1994--fall into the star category.  On the college side, about 69% fall into one of the inconsequential categories.  About 26% are contributing pitchers, and just under 6%--only eight of 140--are stars.

Table 8 shows the year-by-year breakdown for position players:

Table 8:  First Round Position Player Draft Picks, 1965-2001

Here's the table with the corresponding totals ending with the '94 draft:

Table 9:  First Round Position Player Draft Picks, 1965-1994

Things have shifted back to the right-hand columns somewhat.  For position players selected out of high school, approximately 73% of the first round choices have had inconsequential careers.  The corresponding mark for college first rounders is 64%.  The number of starting caliber position players is almost identical for both groups--21% for high school players, 22% for college players.  But the star incidence is more than twice as high for college position players as for high school position players--13% for the former, 6% for the latter.

Conclusions 

What the raw data show us is that the rate of success is consistently higher for first round college players than high school players, regardless of whether they're pitchers or position players.  Choosing players is obviously a crap shoot--roughly seven in ten of the total population will turn out to be of little or no value in the end--but the success rate is lower for high school players than college players, by roughly 10 percentage points.  

A caveat:  the analysis is a lot more straight forward for pitchers than it is for position players, despite the apparently comparable disparities in both groups.  Over the course of the draft that we're considering for the main part of our analysis (i.e. 1965-94), of the pitchers drafted in the first round, 54.7% were high schoolers, 45.3% collegians.  That's not a huge disparity and it's tightened even more in recent years (the total for the full population, 1965-2001, is roughly 53-47 in favor of high schoolers).  But for position players, the difference is much larger; approximately 66% of the position players chosen in the first round from 1965 through '94 were drafted out of high school.  Only about 34% were collegiate ballplayers.  That's nearly a 2-1 difference and it's narrowed by only about a percentage point since 1994.  Simply put, teams appear to be doing a better job of cherry picking college position players than college pitchers.  Almost as many pitchers (140) were selected from college programs from 1965-94 as position players (149) despite the fact that there are far, far more position players to choose from.  This could be poisoning the comparative numbers to some degree because teams are obviously more willing to take a chance on high school position players than high school pitchers...or they're less willing to take a flyer on college position players than college pitchers, at least in the first round of the draft.  There's some logic to this approach (position players appear to peak sooner than pitchers, who are far less predictable; and high school pitchers appear far more susceptible to injury down the road than collegians, etc.), but strictly for analytical purposes, it would seem that we're dealing with a much higher end ballplayer in the first round on the position player side than the pitcher side, at least when it comes to collegians.

On the pitching side, there's no caveat at all.  First round pitchers drafted out of high school are tossed on the rubbish heap (or might as well be) just about 80% of the time.  The comparable number on the college side is just under 70%, which is still pretty bad.  But an 80% throw away rate almost defies belief.  So does a 2% star rate.  I rated only four first round high school pitchers as stars since 1965.  I'll name them for you:  J.R. Richard (1969-10 seasons); Don Gullett (1969-9 seasons); Frank Tanana (1971-20 seasons); Dwight Gooden (1982-16 seasons).  Now, take note of these guys--there are only four.  All of them had problems that kept them from having Hall of Fame careers.  Gullett and Tanana came down with serious arm problems fairly early; Gullett's problems ended his career; Tanana went from being one of the most dominant pitchers in baseball to being a finesse pitcher, though a reasonably successful one.  Richard had a stroke in 1980 which ended his career.  Gooden had the well-publicized problems with alcohol and drugs, which he eventually overcame, but they all but ended what appeared to be a great career.  That's the best of the bunch...and note that there hasn't been a single high school pitcher drafted in the first round to fall into the star classification since Gooden in 1982.  Now, obviously there are a few who could yet achieve that status, but the best high schoolers drafted--at least in terms of big league accomplishments--since 1990 are guys like Shawn Estes, Todd Ritchie, Chris Carpenter, Jeff D'Amico, Kerry Wood, Adam Eaton, C.C. Sabathia and Josh Beckett.  Estes and Ritchie are well into their careers at this point, and while both have value, neither is likely to become a star pitcher.  Carpenter is hurt--get used to this, it's going to come up a lot.  D'Amico has been on the DL more times in his career than I can count.  Wood has already missed an entire season due to Tommy John surgery.  Eaton is hurt.  Sabathia's in just his second season and Beckett's a rookie.  This isn't exactly a Hall of Fame pedigree we're talking about.

Teams should draft high school pitchers in the first round at their peril.  In light of the evidence, I'm not sure that I'd ever do it.  The downside, even for pitchers with undeniably great arms like Kerry Wood, is so large it's almost unfathomable.  

Frankly, given the amount of upfront money invested in first round picks and given the dreadful level of success of both high school pitchers and high school position players, one has to wonder if it doesn't make sense to virtually eschew high school players entirely in the first round of the draft, no matter how talented they are, because they're simply more likely to bring no return at all in the end than college players.  The team that concentrates on choosing the best college players--pitchers and position players--available in the early stages of each draft is almost certain to end up ahead of the game in the long run.

Another approach might be to focus on position players and effectively ignore pitchers entirely in the first round.  This is not a popular suggestion around baseball.  Pitchers have been dominating the first round of the draft for more than a decade.  The problem is, there's relatively little to show for it.  It's clearly easier to identify players who will be good everyday players than good pitchers--not easy, just easier.  This has been true throughout baseball history, going all the way back to the early years of the draft when more position players were being chosen, proportionally, than is presently the case.

Whichever choice is made, staying away from high school pitchers in the first round appears to a virtual no-brainer. 

Next:  A look at first round drafting, franchise by franchise.

Back to Birds in the Belfry