A difference between the "NFL BPA" and the additional strategy in the MLB draft.

[Sports Guy]

9 hours ago, Sydnor said:

This is correct. In the NFL and NBA teams draft the player where value meets need unless they need everything. The Bills, Chiefs, Bengals, and Eagles aren’t drafting a QB with their highest pick regardless of whether the QB is the highest graded player on their board at the time. 

Those guys are drafting at the end of the first round, so a QB is not likely to be high on their boards but if Bryce Young fell to one of them, they would take him and use him as trade bait.

[sportsfan8703]

11 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

Those guys are drafting at the end of the first round, so a QB is not likely to be high on their boards but if Bryce Young fell to one of them, they would take him and use him as trade bait.

I’ll stick with the NFL analogies… why pick a HS pitcher that is essentially like picking and chasing the 5th best QB in the draft. Also, 1B are like running backs in the NFL. 
 

I say take a SS. That seems like the best value around where we pick. Just keep drafting and developing them. Heck, Holliday could move to CF to replace Mullins. 
 

Nimmala RH SS and the LH 3B Taylor from TCU seem like good fits. Don’t sleep on the fact that LHB play up in OPACY. I’d go with Taylor, then shoot some shots with high upside HS position prospects at some point. 

Edited July 7, 2023 by sportsfan8703

[Sports Guy]

11 minutes ago, sportsfan8703 said:

I’ll stick with the NFL analogies… why pick a HS pitcher that is essentially like picking and chasing the 5th best QB in the draft. Also, 1B are like running backs in the NFL. 
 

I say take a SS. That seems like the best value around where we pick. Just keep drafting and developing them. Heck, Holliday could move to CF to replace Mullins. 
 

Nimmala RH SS and the LH 3B Taylor from TCU seem like good fits. Don’t sleep on the fact that LHB play up in OPACY. I’d go with Taylor, then shoot some shots with high upside HS position prospects at some point. 

Why pick a HS pitcher? I mean, there are tons of reasons why and tons of success stories to prove it.

But I tend to doubt a HS pitcher will be BPA on the Os board.

[sportsfan8703]

27 minutes ago, Sports Guy said:

Why pick a HS pitcher? I mean, there are tons of reasons why and tons of success stories to prove it.

But I tend to doubt a HS pitcher will be BPA on the Os board.

There’s so many HS SS in this draft. It’s loaded. What’s really the difference between the HS SS ranked 15 and 45?  I see us going NCAA bat first(Taylor 3B TCU) then taking a HS SS with our 2nd selection(Cooper Pratt HS SS). Pratt has drawn Gunnar comparisons. 

[btdart20]

14 hours ago, 2001OriolesFan said:

The Orioles do NOT have a strong pipeline of top pitching  and it looks like, with the position players, have a 4-7 year window of excellence coming up. They can trade surplus present good veterans for pitching.  They can trade surplus OF and IF for pitching.  They can trade surplus high ceiling prospects for pitching prospects (not a common approach but it could work now and here).  They can really concentrate on pitching in the upcoming draft.  I wonder i they should drop back from drafting the BPA with their #17 pick and take some college pitcher, expected to be in the 25-35's.  They could pay him money from that zone of bonus money and get a million or so to then go after high ceiling players who probably are going to decide to wait a year or two before going pro, so they would get more money later as they would be picked in a higher round.  It might be the best way to get higher quality pitching a few years down the road.

This should be in the draft forum.

The O's do play the over/under-slot games.  But it's pretty clear they don't punt a pick and take a scrub (as evidenced by Cowser and Kjerstad) even if they don't purely go BPA.  But they seem to tier their board to some degree and (where they deem appropriate) pick a cost-conscience player so they can go over-slot later who they feel confident that they can develop the best.  Which might look like not going BPA at times.  

The biggest under-slot savings to 'afford' over-slot picks later are early in the first round.  Jackson signed for a record $8.19 million and that still was $650k savings that could go toward later picks.  Is that under-slot?  Is that BPA (because his performance would say yes)? 

Going under-slot (in the traditional sense) in round 1 is risky because the success rate of players taken later than round 1 drops pretty quickly.  Elias isn't going to add risk in the way you're suggesting.  He's going to pick someone he thinks will add organizational value (and that doesn't mean drafting for organizational need).  Saving $500k (or whatever) is much less important than having quality talent that we can develop in the pipeline.  At the end of the day, the draft is cheap cost of talent acquisition at the MLB level if they actually make it to/perform at the MLB level.  And that's the end goal and importance of success with those early picks.

On the over-slot side, the strategy is basically pulling talent into this year's draft that would be available in future years anyway.  It's really tough for a HS or young college kid to walk away from $500k-$1m (a bird in the hand...) for the hope of $3m in a few years (if they are lucky enough to be a late first round pick later).

Baumler and Showalter (to a lesser degree) are over-slot pitching examples over the last two years.

Dowling Catholic's Carter Baumler officially signs with Baltimore Orioles (desmoinesregister.com)

[Can_of_corn]

6 hours ago, Hallas said:

There is always nuance to every situation, but I'd probably argue that, you should pretty much always draft BPA if you're drafting in the top of the draft in any sport, but the threshold for drafting BPA vs need changes based on draft position.  In the NFL I would consider the practice of trading down to still be BPA assuming that you draft as such when you actually make your pick.  So i think BPA is always the best option in the NFL.  In the NBA I think BPA in all situations is  the best strategy only for top-5 or top-10 picks, and after that you should be factoring in need and roster construction.  The NBA hit rate for draft picks is kind of wacky, roster construction is more important because there's only 5 players on the floor and only 13 people on the roster, so it might make sense to look for a serviceable player that fills a hole if you have a solid team otherwise in the late lottery.

 

The fact that baseball gives teams allotments rather than slotted contracts means that signability matters much more in baseball than in other sports.  But as a general rule, need doesn't factor into it, and it's still in a sense BPA; but it's BPA relative to their expected contract demands, rather than absolute BPA.

I don't view it that way.  I view it as taking additional draft capital instead of taking the BPA, probably because your needs dictated it as being the better move.

I view trading down in the NFL draft as a great example of drafting for need.

[2001OriolesFan]

9 hours ago, Alasdaire said:

You mean they wanted to draft and then offer the overslot to someone more than they did Creed but those guys weren't available to them?

I'm sure that's the case, but I can't believe they didn't anticipate that. Taking Cowser means they presumably went into 2021 consciously employing the underslot approach, so surely they had guys all over the board who they were comfortable with offering the leftovers to, and that had to have included Willems. Because if alternative is that they went underslot at 1:5 and then ran out of players who they deemed worthy of the overslot, then they're naive, and I don't think they're that.

OP's strange accusation was that no one believes the O's would go underslot with their first-round pick and then pass on the savings to a late-round pick, and OP pointed to 2022 and Carter Young. But that signing wasn't due to money being passed on from their first-round pick, it was just a zero-sum game that they constructed as between McLean and Young, which is a different approach.

My approach is that, due to the lack of pitching depth in the pipeline, the O's could pick a lower ranked pitcher with their first pick, and then use the saved money to go overslot bonus with a lot of the remaining picks.

You can think of this as being done in two different styles.  First, say there is a good pitcher ranked at #100.  Right now, he is the 100th best player.  If he is drafted at #100 and gets his "published" slot bonus, he gets $ 671 K He could stay in college for two years and then be drafted ? #30  $ 2,732K, which is 2 million dollars more. ..... So why not?  He is sort of getting $1 million a year for going to college. ........... So the Orioles don't get this great player, even if they try to draft him.  If they OVERPAY him by $1 million, he may decide to take the O's offer and go pro. ... Now the Orioles will have to carry him for 2-3 years before he grows up, but they get a player, with a #100 draft pick, that they would never have been able to draft if they waited those two years.  THAT IS WHY YOU DO THE OVERSLOT/UNDERSLOT GAME.  It is to draft better players.  ,,, "BPB" with the draft pick and NO overslot money is NOT part of the MLB game.

Another thing is that you can tailor the bonus money to make the benefit/cost value of any draft pick work out to what you want.   IF your draft pick is #83 and you like a guy who is ranked #97m then you can offer a smaller bonus to bring the benefit/cost ratio into the right range. Likewise with a guy who you rank higher than where he is when you dratft him.

 

About the same

 

[sportsfan8703]

I don’t think we get risky and draft a pitcher high in this draft. This will be our last draft in a long time where we won’t be picking late in round one. Also, if we do decide to sign some FA’s we might have to surrender a draft pick to do so. So I think we stick with drafting bats, and restocking the system to go with last year’s draft class, to build the next group of top 100 prospects. 

[Alasdaire]

6 hours ago, 2001OriolesFan said:

My approach is that, due to the lack of pitching depth in the pipeline, the O's could pick a lower ranked pitcher with their first pick, and then use the saved money to go overslot bonus with a lot of the remaining picks.

You can think of this as being done in two different styles.  First, say there is a good pitcher ranked at #100.  Right now, he is the 100th best player.  If he is drafted at #100 and gets his "published" slot bonus, he gets $ 671 K He could stay in college for two years and then be drafted ? #30  $ 2,732K, which is 2 million dollars more. ..... So why not?  He is sort of getting $1 million a year for going to college. ........... So the Orioles don't get this great player, even if they try to draft him.  If they OVERPAY him by $1 million, he may decide to take the O's offer and go pro. ... Now the Orioles will have to carry him for 2-3 years before he grows up, but they get a player, with a #100 draft pick, that they would never have been able to draft if they waited those two years.  THAT IS WHY YOU DO THE OVERSLOT/UNDERSLOT GAME.  It is to draft better players.  ,,, "BPB" with the draft pick and NO overslot money is NOT part of the MLB game.

The O's are already very familiar with the idea of going underslot early on. It definitely happened in 2020 with Heston --> Mayo. Some people act like it didn't happen in 2021 with Cowser --> Willems, but it's at least arguable.

Anyway, I think it would be a mistake to go into the draft targeting an underslot college pitcher in the middle of the first round.

It's one thing to go into a draft with the second or fifth pick and say that you're going to take a college hitter who you know is going to be there. Picking that early narrows the other team's possibilities to a manageable level, there is significant money to be sent down when you have that big of a pool, and college hitters are more able to be projected.

Whereas when you're sitting at 17, you don't know who is going to be there, there's not as much money to spread around, and I would be very surprised if their model churned out a strong projection for a college pitcher who wasn't good enough to go in the top-10.

[Sydnor]

9 hours ago, Sports Guy said:

Those guys are drafting at the end of the first round, so a QB is not likely to be high on their boards but if Bryce Young fell to one of them, they would take him and use him as trade bait.

I wasn’t talking about Bryce Young or someone of his caliber. There are often QBs picked at the end of the first round or early in the second round so the drafting team has the fifth year option. Here is an example of what I’m saying…

This year the Bengals picked 28th in the draft. Even if Will Levis was their highest graded player (and none of us can know if he was), they weren’t going to draft him because they have Joe Burrow. Trading the pick also might not be an option because if they trade back they might not be able to draft Myles Murphy. Therefore, they drafted Myles Murphy, the player where value met need.

[Malike]

On 7/6/2023 at 5:26 PM, 2001OriolesFan said:

By the way, if you think that the O's would never do anything like this,,,, remember Carter Young.  He was drafted in the 27th round of the 2022 draft and got a bonus for signing of $1.325 million.  .....  I guess you all forgot.  https://www.anchorofgold.com/2022/8/1/23287992/orioles-sign-mighty-carter-young-for-1-35-million     .   https://www.tennessean.com/story/sports/college/vanderbilt/2021/04/30/carter-young-9-facts-vanderbilt-baseball-shortstop/4894085001/

 

In our defense, it's hard to remember a 22-year-old with a .656 OPS in Low A ball.

[Hallas]

16 hours ago, mhd24 said:

 

Well, it depends in the NBA.  Say Denver (for example) was picking in the first and a center was deemed the highest rated player based purely on talent.  They really would have no reason to take such a center since he'd never play with Jokic.  Denver (due to luxury tax concerns) would rather take BPA at any other position as that player would get far more minutes than a backup center would and would be cost-controlled for 4 years at least.  

 

Specifically, say in this last draft, Denver had the 12th pick for some reason.  They are not taking Derek Lively because he makes no sense on that roster because Lively will never play with Jokic there.  They'd probably take the best wing instead even if they individually had Lively rated as a better prospect than anyone on the board.

If they have the 12th pick?  Sure, pick for need.  I mentioned earlier that after ~10 or so the draft is such a crapshoot in the NBA and roster construction is important enough that you need to cover your holes over picking up talent.

 

But if they have 1:1?  They're taking Wembanyama and then figuring out how to get both Joker and Wemby on the floor.