bird

Back to the examples: Boston hit on Youkilis with the 243rd pick. Meaning they passed on him 8 times and instead took prospects that sucked. And they took the risk, 193 times if you believe whydidn't's hypothetical, that all 29 other teams were too stupid to project him as any better than worthy of the 244th pick. Why did Boston do that? whydidnt was arguing that it was smart and intentional and an indication of skill. Boston missed on Matt Carpenter and Brian Dozier. All three teams passed on both of them many times over and instead took a bunch of prospects that sucked. The Cards and Twins were smart enough to know that Boston and 28 other teams would be stupid enough to pass on Carpenter and Dozier many times over. Boston, St. Louis, and the Twins are all good at drafting. Personally, I think Boston and the Cards have both likely been just a tad better at talent evaluation than the Twins, but I can't prove it. All three teams have been really smart and really stupid. Fans often want to point to their team's misses and the other teams' hits to justify their opinion that their own team's "mistakes" are blameworthy. The reason I reject simplistic conclusions about good and bad drafting based on adding up a bunch of WAR generated by players like those mentioned? Two reasons. One, you guys haven't explained to me how teams can somehow be such geniuses and so stupid one round of the draft to the next, and how teams are so dang good at calculating the brainpower of the scouts on the other 29 teams and therefore know they're all going to stupidly pass on Brian Dozier 251 times or whatever it is. As I pointed out, the Cards have generated 82 WAR from players taken in the 4th round and later from 2001-2010. The Twins have gotten 41.6 WAR. Personally, my bet is this difference is much more because of better player development than better talent evaluation. I can't prove it. I might be wrong. But all of the inconsistencies I just described here, all this genius and stupidity exhibited by the same people? You guys want me to add up a bunch of WAR, or accept a list of random genius selections as evidence of good scouting? Trout's selection makes LAA geniuses, and yet they have two B- prospects or better in their system compared to the Twins' 14? For years, I've been saying they're all good at evaluating talent, and they all hit on some and miss on others. And yes, luck is involved. Lots of luck. It's the draft. If you want to make a case that the Twins are lousy at the draft that I will accept, you're going to have to do better with the presentation of the evidence. And please don't point to the W-L record, or even to a list of their starting pitchers, and then tell me they don't know talent when they see it. I now view those "arguments" as obtuse rants. Those same evaluators passed muster on Ervin Santana and Brian Kintzler and Stephen Gonsalves and Fernando Romero and Lewis Thorpe and Taylor Rogers and... And please, please, NEVER use the word "excuses" when you refer to a counter argument someone makes, Mr. whydidnt. It's disrespectful, okay? Thank you.

And let's not forget that everyone weighed in. The front office , the MLB staff, all the pitching coaches who worked with Berrios all of last year and saw him briefly this spring. He would have made the roster if all those folks were in favor of it.

Mauer's situational hitting improves dramatically when he bats with no one on.

This became fun.

I feel like I'm becoming more familiar than is comfortable with your dirty dishes, dirty toilet, and now your dirty laundry.

Yeah, well at least he pulled the ball to left center for his out.

FIFY

I never had to grow a beard for my mother in law. She hated everything I did.

And I find it humorous that some people will think it's useful at all :-)

But that's the point, my friend. There's no way to adequately judge talent evaluation, really, beyond taking a look at decisions for which a number of teams had an equal shot. Which limits the analysis to the first round of the amateur draft, and even those results only tell us so much. But you seemed to be willing to make that judgment. You want to discount the other factors and attribute the blame for the bad record on poor talent evaluation and to criticize a few picks in the first round which haven't worked out so far without allowing for any context. I didn't miss your Youkilis point. Of course they rated him higher than 29 other teams did, by perhaps a couple dozen prospects even. Congratulations to them. However, they passed on Matt Carpenter 17 times in 2009. If they weren't so incompetent, they would have had him ranked higher than the Cards did, because he's generated 19 WAR. And if they thought so highly of Anthony Rizzo after picking him after they and everyone else stupidly passed him by several times, he wouldn't be playing for the Cubs now, would he? For every Youkilis and Carpenter genius move, those very same teams pull a Kolbrin Vitek (Boston, 1.20 in 2010) and a Zack Cox (Cards, 1.25 in 2010). Even Alex Wimmers looks better than those picks (Twins, 1.21, 2010).

I'm sorry, but this is utterly nonsensical, unless you think all 29 competitors laid their cards on the table for Boston to see. Perhaps you're the one ignoring probabilities here. They were lucky no other team picked him with one of their 8 chances. Period. They knew absolutely NOTHING about the probabilities that other teams would pass on him. They likely saw him as pretty much only worthy of about the 243rd pick, nothing more, nothing less. They did not know what cards were in the hands of the other players, right? Right? You have to concede this point first, and then maybe you can convince me about what secret sauce the Cards used when they picked Gregerson in the 28th round and let him generate 6.5 WAR for some teams. Or what magic the Twins temporarily borrowed when they took Blackburn in the 29th round, 857th overall, and suffered through his generating 3.2 WAR.

Absolutely, spycake, and they do. Some teams have a great track record in terms of producing talent from later rounds. The Cards for example. From 2001-2010, the Cards hit with 12 players after the 3rd round, generating 81.8 WAR from them. In contrast, the Twins had 10 4th round and later prospects "make it", generating 41.6 WAR, but half of them were Achter Tonkin O'Rourke Manship Tolleson. I can't prove it but my theory is that this extra success is due to three other things to a much greater extent than having better scouts on the staff and therefore consistently picking better talent: 1. Better development of talent because of a stronger financial and organizational commitment to it. 2. More WAR being generated by those players simply by being on better teams. 3. Better systems and processes and facilities.

Wait. So you're telling me that there's a chance that Boston decided to take a chance 193 straight times that no one else, not a single one of 29 teams, had this guy projected as something better than the 243rd best pick? That's not remotely believable. And you're going to hypothetically give them credit for "knowing" that Youkilis was one of the best 50 prospects. So, if they were skilled enough to know that, then why were they not skilled enough to "know" that not one of the six prospects taken ahead of Youkilis would even make it to the pros? Or that their first round pick would be a disappointment?

We're discussing the draft. If you've followed this thread and others, you will note that many of us, myself included, have talked about the organizational mistakes and possible weaknesses in other very important areas, especially trading, international free agency, prospect development, sell discipline (buy low sell high), processes and technology, facilities, ownership, Ryan, budget, etc. I have consistently pushed back on one argument: that the poor record is a function of poor talent acquisition, and especially the "mistakes" people perceive to exist in the first round of the draft. I've studied the draft history of the Twins and compared it to the other teams. My conclusion is that the real culprits of their lousy record are these other things, some much more than others. Not talent evaluation. Help me out with a conundrum please. Earlier in this thread, I used Kevin Youkilis as an example of one player whose selection dramatically alters the perception people have of a teams drafting expertise, having generated 30+ WAR as a late 8th round pick. What caused 29 teams to pass on a clear first round talent 8 times, and why did Boston opt to pass on him 7 times, with all but their first selection (Shoppach, 8 WAR) giving them zero WAR? I'd be happy to attribute this selection to skill. I don't know how, with Youkilis or Puckett, or Trout or Dozier...I can sort of buy an argument that if a team is "lucky" enough to do this more consistently than the competition, maybe there's some skill involved. But I'm much more inclined to think development played a bigger role. That seems more logical. This is why I find any debate about talent-finding skills using examples outside of the first round to be useless. The Twins did not calculate that every team would pass on a first round talent like Dozier five times. They thought he was a 6th round talent.

Let's play ten hypothetical hands of poker. Hypothetically, the dealer deals me better cards than the cards he deals you seven out of the ten times. We play each hand, and at the end, you've "only" won four times while I've won six times. Aren't you very likely the better poker player? Or maybe I played one hand poorly and you benefitted, who really knows. But when all we look at is the results, you lost. Bad record. Crappy poker player. You're out of chips, so you must be crappy at poker. Don't tell me what the dealer dealt you. Those are just excuses, not explanations. And if you played one hand poorly, that's unforgivable. Crappy crappy crappy. This thread started with a sort of invitation to explore the questions. Unlike with our poker game, where there is a clear winner, there's room to ponder (and argue) whether we lost a round despite having a superior hand or won despite a poorer hand. In my opinion, while the criticism of my playing from hand to hand may very well be valid, too many people are simplistically looking at the final record as all that should be considered and are summarily concluding falsely that the record is much more a function of lousy card playing than it is. Maybe we should sometimes concede that we just got beat by someone with a superior hand. Perhaps acknowledge that, when we make up a list of first round picks that became aces, that we're not looking at a list of two that we passed on. And we can perhaps acknowledge our four wins. Explanations. Not excuses. For the ten-year period from 2001-2010, every single team was dealt a slightly different hand. I have deep admiration for the Red Sox and their performance over the first half of that time frame, because they took lousy draft slots and converted them into Lester, Pedroia, and Ellsbury, but I know they have fans lamenting that they soiled the bed from 2006-2010 with five picks that generated a total of-2.0 WAR. We have to view things in context.

I get this Levi, but please answer this question. If you were going to place a bet on a prospect based on the opinion of me versus the opinion of Law, Sickles, Callis, and two other experts, who you gonna call? So, when you and I are trying to reconcile our differences in perception about the talent quality in the system, and Sickles, Law, Callis, and two others have a higher opinion about the talent than you do, I'm siding with them, even though, like you, I know they are probably as wrong about a lot of these guys as the GMs and scouting directors. I have to go with the belief that they're going to be more right than you and me.

If you were to gain a full understanding of what has transpired year over year, your conclusion would be different. I believe it's your analysis that is flawed, and therefore so is your conclusion.

Gordon may end up being an okay MLB shortstop, but when it comes to triples, he won't hold a candle to Sano.

Matt Garza has produced 14 WAR. Perkins gave us 9 WAR. It's the draft, so I don't have any expectations, just the hope that Jay gives us better than the average #6 production over time in whatever role he has.

If anyone refutes the argument that the bad record is primarily a function of poor scouting, drafting, and development, or attempts to add factual context to the draft history, they're just making excuses?

If it's the one I'm thinking about, I didn't ignore it and found it interesting. But I have a huge problem with looking past the first round and saying a good selection was due to a team's superior judgment. Here's an example: Kevin Youkilis was selected as the 243rd pick in the 2001 draft. That meant every team in baseball passed him up 8 times. Eight times, each team scanned his stat sheet and set it back down, thinking they had a better idea. This guy generated more WAR (32.7) during his career than any Twin not named Mauer (50.1) since 2001. Span is the closest at 25.1. So, if we want to credit Boston for being so much better at this drafting thing, we have to believe that they somehow calculated that none of the other 29 teams would catch on to what they knew. In which case they could simply wait to snatch him up with their 8th pick of the draft. But not their 9th, because someone else, by their calculations, had Youkilis in their sites as a value as a 9th round pick. So why not wait to nab a guy you know is going to be a stud? After all, after picking Kelly Shoppach with your first selection, it was important to pass on Youkilis 6 more times so you could pick guys named Chico, Devries, Baille, West, James, and Viera, none of whom made the majors. Maybe Boston wasn't just lucky to make that selection and accumulate more WAR than Dozier and Neshek combined. But frankly, I can't give the Twins or Red Sox credit for good scouting for these picks other than in a vacuum. I can grasp the argument someone might make, which is that results, in this case measured by WAR, tell you enough about who's any good at finding talent and who's not. I don't buy that. If the Twins projected that Dozier was going to give them 19.1 WAR by now and that Gibson might be finished after giving them 3.9 WAR, they would have passed on Gibson and seven others and snapped up Dozier instead of waiting until the 6th round. Sorry, I'm going to call the Dozier and Youkilis picks luck.

I can agree to use the same word to describe the starting pitching situation. Like you, I think the rotation problem is somewhat dire, but that's because we need so many of the pitching prospects to come through due to the terrible rotation we're throwing out there in MLB right now. We need three of Berrios, Mejia, Gonsalves, Romero, the 2017 draft selection, Thorpe, Jorge, or Stewart to come through for us over the next couple of years. That's of course assuming we find no other avenue to fix the problem, such as trades or FA. But Levi, I think it's very possible to disagree with your statement that the Twins starting pitching talent pool is among the worst in baseball. You would have to accept that Sickles is a good evaluator for the following to alter your viewpoint. Or perhaps you're quite certain that if you dig deeper you'll discover that the Twins are the beneficiary of grade inflation in Sickle's case, and therefore the following information lacks credence for you. But indulge me: According to Sickles, 171 -pitchers were worthy of at least a B- grade. If evenly distributed, each team would have 5.7 pitchers of that calibre. Thirteen teams had fewer than 6 such pitchers. Another six teams had exactly 6 such pitchers. So, eleven teams out of thirty had at least 7 pitchers who graded out as B- or better. Three had 7. Another four had 8, including the Twins. The last four teams had 9, 10, or 11. Five of the Twin's 8 B grade prospects project to be starters, the exceptions being Jay, Burdi, and Shaggy. I think the nitty gritty is the analysis and conclusions of guys like Law, Callis, and Sickles, not the personal opinions of you or me. And while the analyses and conclusions these guys reach might be subject some variance in interpretation, one would be hard-pressed to interpret Sickle's grades, or even Law's rankings, to mean they regard the Twin's pitching situation as among the worst in baseball.

But 19th worst or 14th worse are different descriptions. Don't miss the point some of us are making, which is that, with nothing whatsoever to back it up, some want to describe the situation in the worst of all possible terms. Like 5th worst. And people aren't dying on a hill about it, they're just calling bull.

The game is so different now. Can you imagine promoting a player that quickly and having them adjust? We can't even get top picks to do that.

Hope he sells a ton of books. He needs the dough.