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