First Round Pick Visualizations

Here are two auxiliary plots in conjunction to the post made last week.  They provide a bit more insight into players who have been drafted in the first round over the past 19 amateur drafts.  

Unsurprisingly, the trendline featured in the above visualization indicates that the WAR created by first round picks slopes modestly downward over the course of the first round.  In other words, those players taken at the very top of the draft generally do better than those taken a little bit later.  As mentioned last week, these data include players taken as supplemental first round picks so picks, in one year’s case, reach as far back as 64th overall. 

As of the end of 2018, the top five players in WAR created in the first round are as follows:

1: Zack Greinke, 65.7 WAR

2: Chase Utley, 65.4 WAR

3: Clayton Kershaw, 64.6 WAR

4: Mike Trout, 64.3 WAR

5: Justin Verlander, 63.4 WAR

These players, incidentally, are the only five players taken in the first round over this stretch to have been worth 60+ WAR to date.  While Chase Utley’s statistics are, barring unforeseen circumstances, now set in stone, all of the remaining four players appear well on their way to the 70 WAR threshold.  Mike Trout is the likely bet to lead this cohort by the end of 2019.  

Noteworthy are the number of players whose WAR sit below zero – a reflection of the immense difficulty of carving out significant time in the majors as well as hitting the ground running upon making the big league roster.  In all, 134 players in this group have zero or negative WAR altogether, a huge number given a dataset of just 866 players.

Last week’s post focused in particular on the WAR created by players drafted at various positions.  Here, those subdivisions are given in faceted scatter plots.

The “Type” legend on the righthand side refers to the level at which these draftees were playing at the time of their signing.  This legend provides a couple opportunities for interesting conjecture.  For one, three quarters of the 20+ WAR left handed pitchers (six of eight) were taken out of high school rather than college.  The two most successful JC picks of this era were both outfielders: Bryce Harper (College of Southern Nevada) and Nick Markakis (Young Harris College). Particularly successful Major League shortstops (taken in the first round) appear to be disproportionately more often taken out of high school opposed to college.

Curious too is the breakdown of right handed and left handed pitching draftees, respectively.  Nearly twice as many first round RHP’s have been taken than LHP’s, yet more lefties have accumulated 20+ WAR so far this century.  That said, those players are clearly the select few; after those eight 20+ WAR LHP’s, no other lefty appears to have been worth 15+.  As for right handed pitchers, while there aren’t as many staggering successes, proportionately speaking, there also does not appear to be such a binary outcome as there is for left handed pitchers.

If anything this breakdown of these first round data highlights the heavy presence of outliers.  Put simply, baseball is incredibly hard.  While last week’s post concluded that first round draftees from 2000-2010 may “average” just over 5.5 WAR per player, that total is particularly misleading given the weight of outliers.  Chase Utley has generated literally more than three times as much WAR as the next closest second basemen here. Adrian Gonzalez was easily the most successful first basemen prospect taken the the first round over the last 19 years.  For every 20+ WAR player, there is a host of athletes who could not mirror that exceptional success.