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>The baseball draft is somewhat clueless; that's why they have 40 rounds rather than two or seven like a sport that has any idea at all about who's going to suc

by slg 7y ago

>The baseball draft is somewhat clueless; that's why they have 40 rounds rather than two or seven like a sport that has any idea at all about who's going to succeed. That is just factually wrong. The MLB draft has 40 rounds because there are over 5 thousand players in professional baseball which is more than double the NFL and more than 10 times the NBA. Athletic skill traditionally follows a normal distribution which means the similarity in players' skill levels converges the deeper you go into the bell curve. The result is there is generally a smaller gap in talent between the 500th and the 1000th player selected than their is between the 1st and 100th player selected. If Mahomes had the skill of a 3rd rounder, there were way more than a 100 guys in front of him for an eventual MVP. Here [1] is an article looking at the value of MLB draft picks that supports my point. [1] - https://blogs.fangraphs.com/an-update-on-how-to-value-draft-picks/ https://blogs.fangraphs.com/an-update-on-how-to-value-draft-...

elgenie 7y ago
To be fair, (part of) the reason that affiliated baseball has 5000 players is the same as reason that the MLB draft has 40 rounds: the gap between high school / college baseball and MLB is incredibly greater than the one between college basketball and the NBA. Power law phenomena in known skills at the long tail of a normal distribution are a red herring in this case; the much much bigger factor is uncertainty about the probability of developing skills years later (can a pitcher add a breaking ball that complements his fastball? will a hitter be able to track MLB curveballs thrown faster than 95% of the fastballs he's seen?). Draft position and prospect status are based on imperfect guesses at the shape of the very very very wide distribution of potential outcomes for an individual player with very little data to go on. The MLB draft is what what the NBA draft would be if they had to select 9th graders based on their performance at HORSE with a kickball on a 9 foot rim and a dunk contest on an 8 foot rim.
- slg 7y ago
  I would argue the difference between amateur and the top level professional baseball is so much wider than other sports just due to happenstance. MLB is older than the NCAA while the NBA and NFL are both younger than the NCAA. Therefore MLB needed to build up its own developmental leagues while the newer professional sports could rely on their college equivalents. Today almost every American born player in the NBA or NFL played in college while a whole lot of their MLB counterparts were drafted out of high school. That isn't due to some inherent difference in each sport or the ability of people to project forward a player's skill. It just the way the leagues happen to be setup. All that said, you are certainly right that a projection of a player's skill is inherently more difficult to make the earlier that prediction must be made.
  - elgenie 7y ago
    The existence of the NCAA doesn't have anything to do with it. It is, however, somewhat of an accident of history that the MLB draft is of high schoolers as opposed to AA/AAA players. Before Branch Rickey pioneered the concept of "farm systems" in the late 1930s, a quarter century after the NCAA was established and around 75 years after the first collegiate baseball game, minor league teams weren't affiliated with MLB teams at all; instead, they were just other leagues with younger/worse players whose rights would be available to the highest bidder. The MLB draft to distribute talent didn't start until 1965, by which time all the teams had well-established farm systems via affiliations with minor league teams. The unpredictability of the gap in performance between high school and pro, though, is IMO larger than in football or basketball due to the fact that the core talents for making it in MLB are not based on pure run-fast-jump-high easy-to-measure athleticism, but rather on reactive skills that even if present in high school are not observable against meaningful competition.
jessaustin 7y ago
The MLB draft has 40 rounds because there are over 5 thousand players in professional baseball... This is more of that "wet streets cause rain" logic we hear about. Baseball has 57 different minor leagues with 1253 minor teams because baseball scouts don't know who is going to be the best player ahead of time. If they did know, they could save themselves a lot of hassle. Hockey has a similar phenomenon, but it's less pronounced. Football has plenty of money, but somehow they feel like all of the player development and testing they need can be accomplished at the collegiate level. They are actually sort of offended by the existence of "minor" football leagues like arena and whatever Vince McMahon has planned. And, of course, this is all beside the point, as mentioned in a sibling thread.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  >they feel like all of the player development and testing they need can be accomplished at the collegiate level. It is cheaper for them to let taxpayers deal with player/coach development and testing.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    It would be cheaper for baseball or hockey teams to do the same thing, but they don't. It's because they hire players before they know which players are the best.

by slg 7y ago

elgenie 7y ago

To be fair, (part of) the reason that affiliated baseball has 5000 players is the same as reason that the MLB draft has 40 rounds: the gap between high school / college baseball and MLB is incredibly greater than the one between college basketball and the NBA. Power law phenomena in known skills at the long tail of a normal distribution are a red herring in this case; the much much bigger factor is uncertainty about the probability of developing skills years later (can a pitcher add a breaking ball that complements his fastball? will a hitter be able to track MLB curveballs thrown faster than 95% of the fastballs he's seen?). Draft position and prospect status are based on imperfect guesses at the shape of the very very very wide distribution of potential outcomes for an individual player with very little data to go on. The MLB draft is what what the NBA draft would be if they had to select 9th graders based on their performance at HORSE with a kickball on a 9 foot rim and a dunk contest on an 8 foot rim.

slg 7y ago
I would argue the difference between amateur and the top level professional baseball is so much wider than other sports just due to happenstance. MLB is older than the NCAA while the NBA and NFL are both younger than the NCAA. Therefore MLB needed to build up its own developmental leagues while the newer professional sports could rely on their college equivalents. Today almost every American born player in the NBA or NFL played in college while a whole lot of their MLB counterparts were drafted out of high school. That isn't due to some inherent difference in each sport or the ability of people to project forward a player's skill. It just the way the leagues happen to be setup. All that said, you are certainly right that a projection of a player's skill is inherently more difficult to make the earlier that prediction must be made.
- elgenie 7y ago
  The existence of the NCAA doesn't have anything to do with it. It is, however, somewhat of an accident of history that the MLB draft is of high schoolers as opposed to AA/AAA players. Before Branch Rickey pioneered the concept of "farm systems" in the late 1930s, a quarter century after the NCAA was established and around 75 years after the first collegiate baseball game, minor league teams weren't affiliated with MLB teams at all; instead, they were just other leagues with younger/worse players whose rights would be available to the highest bidder. The MLB draft to distribute talent didn't start until 1965, by which time all the teams had well-established farm systems via affiliations with minor league teams. The unpredictability of the gap in performance between high school and pro, though, is IMO larger than in football or basketball due to the fact that the core talents for making it in MLB are not based on pure run-fast-jump-high easy-to-measure athleticism, but rather on reactive skills that even if present in high school are not observable against meaningful competition.

jessaustin 7y ago

The MLB draft has 40 rounds because there are over 5 thousand players in professional baseball... This is more of that "wet streets cause rain" logic we hear about. Baseball has 57 different minor leagues with 1253 minor teams because baseball scouts don't know who is going to be the best player ahead of time. If they did know, they could save themselves a lot of hassle. Hockey has a similar phenomenon, but it's less pronounced. Football has plenty of money, but somehow they feel like all of the player development and testing they need can be accomplished at the collegiate level. They are actually sort of offended by the existence of "minor" football leagues like arena and whatever Vince McMahon has planned. And, of course, this is all beside the point, as mentioned in a sibling thread.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
>they feel like all of the player development and testing they need can be accomplished at the collegiate level. It is cheaper for them to let taxpayers deal with player/coach development and testing.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  It would be cheaper for baseball or hockey teams to do the same thing, but they don't. It's because they hire players before they know which players are the best.