DrungoHazewood

Takeaway here is that the median #1 overall is about 20 rWAR for their career, and a #25 pick is 1/5th of that. Anyone who thinks your 2nd round pick should have a solid career in the majors or the GM had failed doesn't understand how any of this works.

You obviously have to do some kind of curve fitting to account for the noise in the signal.

Also, the shorter the schedule the more each game is a true representation of talent. If the NFL played 100 games they would have to rely more and more on depth and the skill of backups and each game would be much closer matchups. If Tom Brady could only start 30% of the time his teams wouldn't be as good. If MLB played 16 games some teams would win 14 or 15, occasionally 16. They'd start Randy Johnson every single game and have him go seven innings. And the NBA is different because of the structure of basketball. Because a game involves like 100 or 200 possessions or whatever, the better team wins a much larger percentage of the time than in most other sports.

I'm not entirely sure why you're approaching this as a problem of not winning games now. You act like Elias and Hyde are being judged by 2019-2021 win totals. They're not being judged on any such thing. It's 98% on how they're setting up the 2023-2033 Orioles for success. It's always been that way. They more-or-less explicitly stated that when Elias was hired. Elias' and Hyde's fitrep report doesn't even have a box for wins.

Part of it is that we don't know the standard deviation of organizational competence compared to the standard deviation of revenues. It's hard to disentangle the two. It's possible that in a universe where each MLB gets $300M in revenues, no more, no less, you still have teams win 60 and others win 105 and success and failure is persistent. We do know that in the pre-free agency era that the Yanks won almost every year and the Browns and Senators and Philles and others were God-awful for generations. But even then resources and resource difference were huge. The Yanks often drew three, five, ten times as many fans as other teams when gate revenues were probably 80% of total revenues. But at least they could set up a framework where teams actually care about this year's wins every year. Unfortunately they've never done that yet in 150 years.

Fix the system. Seven of the 30 MLB teams are at least 18 games out of first and are done for the year. Plus teams like the Nats who were within shouting distance of a wildcard before throwing in the towel. When there are no real consequences to losing and real benefits to draft position and saving on expenses teams will follow the incentives. It is the way it is because the entire history of MLB involves accepting that many teams will simply not be competitive for years on end. If they really wanted to fix this they could have. But they prioritize the owners' finances and wishes over the fans and they always have.

Is +8 OAA a heavy plus? Assuming an extra out in the outfield is worth, what... half a run maybe? So Mullins is +4 runs by range, no judgment on arm, so might be a touch above average. The others say he's negative. What is the average or median error between OAA and TZ or UZR? I always assume my eyes are missing something.

I'd like to see the numbers on value based on draft slot. If you have the #1 overall what advantage are you expected to have over the team that drafts #30? Or #10? Sorry if someone has already posted, I haven't read the entire thread.

People need to understand that the median 1/1 pick isn't anything close to a Hall of Famer. It's Ben McDonald or Bob Horner. Any Hall of Famer you draft at any position is a very unusual case.

They're pretty clearly not going to be significantly better in 2022 just by relying on internal improvements and promotions. They're going to have to go out and find players from outside the organization. Given where they are with competitiveness and money I think the most likely way to do that would be 2011-12 kind of undervalued, underutilized players. The pitching has been so terrible that just finding two starters and three relievers who are competent majors leaguers might add 10 wins. The starters' ERA is collectively, currently the 5th-worst since WWII, the relievers in the bottom 50.

Both history and human nature suggests that the established players see the current system as the gauntlet they had to run through and they'll have a problem if Grayson Rodriguez doesn't have to run that and gets benefits they didn't. Especially if it's going to be at the expense of older players.

The research doesn't sit still, they continue to refine and improve. It's only a problem if you've made definitive judgments on an interim step and get upset that there was more work to do.

Baseball owners are overwhelmingly very conservative (not politically, financially) in that they made a large investment and they want that to appreciate without substantial risk. They're not coming to the table with proposals to completely upend the current system. They're not going to offer open free agency for everyone after four years, it's a non-starter. I'll be astonished if both sides' proposals are not closer to tweaks than overhauls.

That's why you set up the tracking system and you do that math. So you don't have to believe your eyes, when your eyes aren't just focusing on that one thing and you see other team's players a tiny fraction of the season.

If you can get 5% of fans to not stab themselves with a fork repeatedly when you talk about numbers more complicated than RBI you've won.

Nah, I guess you're right. Let's keep doing things exactly the same way and have half the teams going through the motions 100 games a year and try to keep a straight face when you attempt to get people to take it seriously and pay good money for it. In other places you watch the Champions League or the FA cup or the League Cup or Europa League or your national team when your club team is in 11th place, but you're still watching your favorite sport. In America we go watch Scrubs reruns and for God knows what reason the NFL until spring training starts in nine months. It would be a terrible tragedy if we gave Oriole fans a reason to come to the ballpark that doesn't involve pretending to beat the Yanks and the Red Sox for 162 games every single year when you know it's not happening in April.

But it's not every conclusion, it's some outliers. Total Zone and DRS mostly agree, and mostly agree with the scouts. It's just that OAA is better. And if your numbers say a good fielder is a bad one you don't just accept either conclusion, you look into why there is a disagreement.

I'm going to take a lot of credit for suggesting he stop switch hitting years ago.

2002 he spent half the year in high A, 2003 he spent half the year in high A. 2003 he spent half the year in AA, 2004 he spent half the year in AA. 2005 he had 449 PA in AAA, 2006 he had 381 PA in AAA. As a very old draftee I probably would have fast-tracked him a little more. I guess when you have the legendary Chris Burke playing LF in the majors there's no room for a Luke Scott.

You put the best number you can on it, accept that there's some uncertainty and there will be outliers, and you improve as the information and the technology lets you.

To be fair, half the guys who OPS .900 in AA or AAA are repeating the league and much older than the actual prospects. It rarely translates to MLB success. Remember Luis Montanez? In 2008 he hit .335 with 26 homers and a .986 OPS at Bowie, at the age of 26. Most of the real prospects in AA are 22, 23. Montanez' entire MLB career was 500 PAs of a .586 OPS. Scott was the odd, rare case of a veteran repeating a minor league level who had a productive MLB career.

Winning will be far more lucrative than being bad and selling some tickets to Yankee and Red Sox fans.

Oh no, I fully expect half the teams to be playing for nothing from July-on for the rest of my life. I'm just suggesting that there are better ways.

Statcast says Mullins is +8 in OAA. rWAR (really DRS) says he's -4, but DRS isn't on the same level as OAA. Eventually the Statcast data will be available and integrated into freely-available sites like bb-ref and Fangraphs.

He must have had a late start in college, and then spent all four years there. Didn't make his pro debut until 24. Rutschman played three years of college, then missed the COVID year, and he's still going to have 600+ PAs by the time he gets to the age Scott first appeared in the minors.