FINDING MR. RIGHT
Dunn: No. 1 overall pick more likely to be swing and miss than home run » MLB Draft,
In 1965, Major League Baseball began to do something that the National Football League and the National Basketball Association had been doing for decades. It instituted a player draft. The Kansas City Athletics exercised that historic first pick and used it to grab Arizona State outfielder Rick Monday. That turned out to be a good choice. Monday reached the major leagues very quickly and stayed there for 19 years. He was a solid player and twice an All-Star. That gives him a much better resume than many — make that most — of the players who were chosen first overall in subsequent drafts.
Nevertheless, with the benefit of hindsight we now know it was not the selection the A’s should have made. We now know they should have chosen a catcher named Johnny Bench, who wasn’t taken by any team on the first round. The Cincinnati Reds used their second pick (number 35 overall) to claim the player who would anchor The Big Red Machine of the 1970s.
The Athletics did better a year later, The Mets drafted first in 1966 and wasted the selection on a catcher named Steve Chilcott, who went on to play five years of minor league ball but never reached the majors. The A’s drafted second and once again tabbed an Arizona State outfielder. This time it was a fellow named Reggie Jackson.
Was this a pattern? Yes it was, more or less.
The next four drafts yielded Ron Blomberg, Tim Foli, Jeff Burroughs and Mike Ivie as the first players chosen. All went on to have major league careers with varying degrees of success. But none turned out to be the star of his draft class.
Then came the grand klunker of 1971 when the Chicago White Sox selected high school catcher Danny Goodwin with the first pick. He didn’t even sign, choosing instead to enroll at Southern University. In the second round of that draft the Royals used selection 29 to tap and George Brett and the Phillies nabbed Mike Schmidt with the following pick.
Four years later Goodwin was again drafted first overall, this time by the California Angels. That draft pool included Andre Dawson, Lou Whitaker and Lee Smith, none of whom were taken in the first round.
Goodwin remains the only player to be chosen number one twice. He eventually played seven seasons in the major leagues but was never more than a backup catcher.
The people who were well paid to judge baseball talent continued to make ghastly blunders, or at least hindsight tells us that was the case. In 1981, Tony Gwynn wasn’t drafted until the third round. The next year the Mets got Dwight Gooden with the fourth overall pick after the Cubs had taken shortstop Shawon Dunston with the first selection. A year later, the Red Sox picked up Roger Clemens with the 19th selection. Then came 1985 when the Mets took a college outfielder named Shawn Abner with the first pick. They could have taken Mark McGwire or Greg Maddox.
If these facts prove anything it is that baseball scouting and drafting is very difficult. Scouts in other team sports are usually drafting finished players — athletes who will make an immediate impact as soon as they join their new teams. That’s not the case with baseball.
Baseball scouts are looking at young men and boys who are still in their teens or early 20s. Most of them are not yet mature enough to play the game at the highest level. The scouts must project what kind of players they will become when the reach physical maturity and that isn’t something anyone can do with certainty.
I’ve come to know a lot of scouts over the years and I don’t consider any of them to be idiots. Yet, if we apply hindsight to the history of the major league baseball draft, that’s what many of them would seem to be.
There have been 55 such drafts (the 56th started on Wednesday night) and in only four instances does it now seem clear that the team making the first selection got the best player.
The Mariners did that twice, when they took Ken Griffey, Jr. in 1987 and Alex Rodriguez six years later, The Mets tabbed the best player on the board in 1980 when they chose Darryl Strawberry and the Braves picked Chipper Jones in 1990.
There are a few other years where the best player may have been taken first, but for one reason or another that’s not a clear fact.
Take 2005, for instance. The Diamondbacks went first that year and took Justin Upton, who has gone on to hit 298 homers and make four All-Star teams. Certainly, that was a good choice but in a field that included Alex Gordon, Ryan Zimmerman, Troy Tulowitzki, Andrew McCutchen and Jacoby Ellsbury can it be said that Upton was the best?
Two years later the Tampa Bay Rays selected Vanderbilt pitcher David Price in 2007, who has gone on to win 150 major league games and one Cy Young Award. However, outfielder Giancarlo Stanton got his start in the same draft.
The Pirates took pitcher Gerrit Cole first in 2011 and a year later the Astros made shortstop Carlos Correa the number one pick. Both, without doubt, were excellent selections and it’s possible that history will show them to be the best in their class, but we can’t make that determination yet. Anthony Rendon, Francisco Lindor and George Springer were also chosen in 2011. The 2012 draft included Corey Seager. It’s possible that none of these players has yet reached the peak of his career.
Nevertheless, it isn’t too early to conclude that the Astros bungled badly when they had the first choices in the 2013 and 2014 drafts. In 2013, they selected pitcher Mark Appel, who never reached the major leagues and has already retired from baseball. Their 2014 choice was a pitcher named Brady Aiken, who refused to sign.
In 2013, the Astros might have chosen Aaron Judge or Kris Bryant. The next season’s possibilities included Aaron Nola, Kyle Schwarber, Trea Turner and Matt Chapman.
Things like this have happened over and over again and those were in normal years. Those were in years where every baseball team could send out a wellfinanced army of scouts to beat the bushes. Area scouts watched hundreds of youngsters play high school and college baseball and turned in reports on the ones they judged to be the best. That brought highly skilled “cross checkers” out of the home office to look at these prospects personally.
Not this year. This is not a normal year.
The college season was aborted in mid-March before it got into full swing. Scouts have been reduced to looking at tapes of games (when available) or reviewing last year’s notes on prospects.
Judging high school prospects is even more iffy, since most states had to abandon the high school season before it had a chance to start. Scouts have nothing reliable to go on unless you want to count last year’s scouting reports on maturing teens as reliable.
A remote draft is underway now and the teams are metaphorically blindfolded as they make their selections. To make matters worse, Major League Baseball chose this year to swing a sledgehammer on the whole process and limit the draft to just five rounds.
If you think previous drafts seem ridiculous when we look back on them, just wait.