How The Twins Drafts Stack Up

Nice break down, Seth.  I've often heard Mackey and others deride the Twins draft success.  Your data mining stamps their arguments with a valid, "It's not that bad."I think the 2003-2012 drafts will have a lot less impact on this organization than the 2012-2017 will.  If you add the overall draft positions in each year for rounds 1-5 and divide by the number of picks in those rounds, you get what I'll call a Top Round Composite, the lower numbers will reflect higher picks, on average.

 

2003 = 433 (5 picks, = TRC 86.6)

2004 = 565 (9 picks, = TRC 62.8)

2005 = 760 (9 picks, = TRC 84.4)

2006 = 581 (6 picks, = TRC 96.8)

2007 = 576 (5 picks, = TRC 115.2)

2008 = 506 (7 picks, = TRC 72.2)

2009 = 533 (6 picks, = TRC 88.8)

2010 = 494 (5 picks, = TRC 98.8)

2011 = 665 (7 picks, = TRC 95)

2012 = 598 (8 picks, = TRC 74.7)

2013 = 375 (5 picks, avg. 75)

2014 = 380 (5 picks, avg. 76)

2015 = 409 (5 picks, avg. 81.8)

2016 = 587 (7 picks, avg. 83.8)

 

I would argue that the most important years for the Twins to have draft success were those in which they had the best chance of being successful. These are the years with the lowest TRC: 2004, 2008, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 (in order). The only two that we can evaluate fairly at this point are 2004 and 2008.

 

2004 was a good draft - Plouffe, Perkins and Swarzak

2008 was pitiful - Hicks (1.9 WAR)

 

2012 - 2017 are the most important draft years for this franchise in the past 15 years.

Nice thinking.

The failure to acknowledge the impact of the draft order on results has consistently caused people to throw out faulty conclusions about who's any good at this drafting stuff and who isn't. Personally, I believe success is much more dramatically skewed by draft order than would be adjusted for by this formula. All teams, I think, have improved at doing their homework on 1st round selections. Still, there's a huge advantage to drafting early, with about 75% of top 10 selections making it, and most with massive impact on that team's WaR numbers, whereas the middle third has a success rate closer to 50% and the final third of first-rounders is closer to 25%. The actual historical numbers are probably not of great value because of the fluidity of things, but the point I'm trying to make is that the "skill" of an organization which has consistently drafted early during this period should be discounted meaningfully, and vice versa for organizations consistently drafting towards the end of the first round.

I'm glad the Twins are more active in the DR and Venezuela the last 5-6 years but that was at least a decade too late. Where were they in the late 80's and 90's when the league first started bursting with Latin talent? I'm also glad the Twins have signed some high upside international guys recently but we can't pretend that they are doing all that they can when half of the league was blowing past their draft allotment and made raids on the market. For a team that has been a bottom feeder the last half decade, they should have been doing everything they could to get prospects including going over budget, they absolutely did not do everything they could.

 

That's history now though, the team has new leadership and hopefully less restrictions. We don't need to dwell on past failures if they actively try to rectify them, it doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that these areas used to be past failures though.

That they got a late jump in the DR is very true. Andy MacPhail, Billy Smith, and Jim Pohlad were beating on Carl Pohlad for years to approve a huge budget increase that would allow them to build the necessary infrastructure (scouts, facilities, relationships). MacPhail once told me it would take ten years for this investment to bear fruit. If we examine things carefully, we can see that we're just starting to see results that compare favorably to other organizations if we exclude the one-off Moncada-type events and focus on the traditional pipeline. When it comes to the IFA situation, the new regime is stepping into a pretty good situation.

This is total nonsense. You guys get an idea in your head (i.e. the Twins do a "good job" of drafting) and cherry-pick stats and divide by zero until you can agree with yourselves. That's not how stats work. Let me just go out on a limb and say that no team that loses 90 or more games in 5 out of 6 seasons should claim to do a "good job" of amateur scouting.

This is total nonsense. I can give you ten reasons the Twins have lost 90 games in those seasons, back each reason up with solid logic and facts, and none of them would have a thing to do with the Twins doing a "bad job" of drafting. 

This is total nonsense. I can give you ten reasons the Twins have lost 90 games in those seasons, back each reason up with solid logic and facts, and none of them would have a thing to do with the Twins doing a "bad job" of drafting. 

I haven't seen many people say the Twins did a bad job drafting.  I've seen some criticism of maximizing and developing talent, of holding on to and supplementing talent, and hitting on impact players.  Hard to dispute a ton of that.  

Regarding the draft, the Twins were vocal with their organizational strategy of taking safe college arms and toolsy high school athletes early.  Basically, they took safe (and cheaper) approaches than riskier high-upside arms or more expensive position players with more highly advanced skills.  This strategy did not seem to change regardless of the available talent pool, or how drafting and scouting changed with analytics.

The strategy worked better when analytics were limited.  As teams pushed all in on Moneyball strategies that emphasized OBP and HR, the Twins continued to emphasize limiting walks and playing defense.  The metrics scoffed at this approach and the Twins kept winning.  The metrics caught up, and pitching and defense became coveted across the league. The Twins had actually taken advantage of a market weakness, the infancy of defensive and pitching metrics, by shear luck.  Guys we used to be able to add and use are now pricing us out. Basically, like many of our prospects, we failed to develop.
 

Let's also keep in mind, the available path to the League should be a lot easier on this team.  We should have more picks making the show, at least for an audition.  With that in mind, it's no wonder it seems we've got loads of fringe 40 man players being protected or cut with little relevance outside of TD forum fodder.  

I find it quite disingenuous to say they took advantage of a market inefficiency based solely on luck. I'm willing to give them a little bit more credit. The weaknesses of the front office were in other areas, not in misunderstanding what makes good baseball teams.

I mean, they did what they set out to do back then.  That's not luck.  i was just pointing out the irony of the fact that they were unwittingly playing moneyball while they were (rightly) critical of the early metrics.  The reason I said it was lucky, is because the team never changed its philosophy even as the metrics improved (in some cases vindicating the front office's initial skepticism).  As the metrics improved, the guys that slipped through to the Twins started getting paid more and by better teams.  The Twins then seemingly desperately tried to switch horses and go to power arms and bats with disastrous results.  The idea of stocking up on huge major league ready bullpen arms was actually super-savvy and ended up being the model that won a WS for the Royals, almost won it for the Indians, and attempted by the Yankees.  The problem is those big college arms weren't as big league ready as we thought.  

The evolution of metrics is fascinating to follow.  The Twins seemingly beat the metrics by focusing on the areas where metrics initially missed (defense and ground balls), but there are fewer and fewer gaps between the stats now.  As such, I wonder how relevant Moneyball is in today's game.  The metrics are now commonly available to fans, let alone analytics staffs.  Are there traits that are still currently undervalued in the market?  Enough to make a difference in roster construction?  The gap in analytics might be foreign markets where stats aren't available, and player development which still seems totally unpredictable.  The Twins have been hit and miss in the first, and pretty poor in the latter.

I believe the Twins FO has used some questionable practices.

Drafting tall pitchers because they would have better success (never mind that Johan Santana was only 6'0" tall).

Drafting relief pitchers out of college with the intention of them becoming starting rotation pitchers (don't know how fully they employed this strategy, but I am not a fan).

I mean, I get they are thinking outside the box, but it feels like there is a reason no one else is doing those things.

Do you have a cite for this? I am not sure I buy that our baseball minds were that eager to expand internationally. TR was getting approval for millions to spend on Ramon Ortiz while our international efforts were still languishing. I think the slow to change attitudes of our baseball people probably played just as large of a role as financial limitations.

That said, they did notably improve in this area by 2009, so it's not particularly relevant anymore.

No, but the site was a backyard BBQ at Andy and Lark MacPhail's home. On lawn chairs.

A lot of the discussion I participated in centered on their (Jim and Andy's) belief that this costly long-term investment, despite the fact that there may not be results for more than a decade, was essential to the team's future.

Keep in mind what the nature of the DR marketplace has been historically. The pipeline back then was controlled by a very few influencers. It took more than throwing a scout down there with a notebook and a checkbook. Things were improving for the Twins every year, albeit slowly as relationships were established and the first academy came to be. I'd categorically disagree with a description that international efforts have been languishing.

They're still making aggressive moves there, as evidenced by the new joint facility in the DR. Based on a number of things, it's relevant to consider the possibility that the Twins actually have their act together to a much greater extent than what might be the consensus thought on the subject. Maybe moreso than a majority of the teams in MLB.

Ramon Ortiz's thing is essentially irrelevant to the Twin's evolving story in the DR. That was just a FA event.

Seth,

This is great work and I have to say it's surprising the #'s are so high. The thing that shocks me is that we could be in the middle of the pack with the poor job done drafting pitchers. Comparing our pitching drafts vs. any Central Division team I have to believe we would be at the bottom and no other team would be close.