College or High School

Now that we’ve had some time to take in the draft and let things digest for a bit (if you will), the question comes up that is always at the forefront of drafting strategy, whether to draft the ‘quick to the pros’ college kids or draft the ‘high upside’ high school kids that may take longer to develop.

As we all have learned there is no set formula to building a winner.  When draft day rolls around you can’t tell whether or not a player will take 2, 3 or 4 years to reach the pros whether they’re coming from HS or college. A lot of how quickly a plyers moves to the majors depends on the player development of the system they’re in.  However, even though it may depend on the system time has shown that advanced college players make it to the majors faster than advanced HS players, they have 3 more years of development against higher competition and it usually shows in thier ability to aclimate themselves faster to the pros.

The problem here is that with a HS player you have the ability to mold them in their most formative baseball years, which is an opportunity you don’t have with college players.  College players, especially pitchers are given a much different experience in college than in the minors after being drafted out of HS.  The major difference being that college coaches are paid to win college games, not prepare players for their major league careers.

This often puts a team in quite a conundrum, some of which we saw this year in the past draft.  Do you take the risk and draft a more ready, possibly more talented college pitcher who you didn’t develop yourself, and therefore are not sure how he will work in your system, or do you take the chance on the high upside, high risk possibility of a HS pitcher who is most likely not as close to his ceiling as most college pitchers are.  Without being to develop pitcher yourself, an organization could be putting itself at risk by drafting too many college players who don’t have much room to grow and therefore could be wasted drafts.

On the flip side, with a high school player who might be dominating against lesser competition, you could be drafting somebody who doesn’t take well to development and won’t find a place in your organization, leading to more wasted draft picks.  Even though you can develop a HS player yourself you don’t have as good of an idea of who they are as a player and your development may not be able to get the most out of a player through his very important 18-19-20 developmental years.

Personally, I am of the opinion that if I was a general manager I would be drafting high upside HS players.  Especially if you were a team in a small market you need to place a much higher empahsis on player development and therefore would need the opportunity to develop your own players in their most formative years, so they could fit right in when they come to the big leagues.  Take a look at the Twins or the Rays for good examples of teams that have placed this emphasis on player development.  Teams that have drafted many college players have not found the level of success as the ones that have concentrated more on HS players.

What say the rest of you?  Would you concentrate on college players or HS players and why?