This weekend’s completion of the NFL draft serves as a reminder that draft season in all major sports is upon us.
The NBA draft will be held in May, the NHL draft will be in early June, and the most important of them all — the 2022 MLB draft — begins in mid-July just following the All-Star break.
And that begs a question of interest to fans of all teams.
Which MLB team executives have established the ability to navigate the challenges and complexities of a baseball draft and emerge with productive results?
Beyond question the MLB draft is the most difficult. For starters, it lasts 20 rounds and involves the selection of more than 600 prospects. Beyond that, teams must sort through both established college/junior college performers and a raft of eligible high schoolers.
There’s a reason why fewer than half of MLB draftees ever experience so much as one Major League game. Baseball talent is hard to judge. Of 36 players taken in the MLB draft five summers ago, 13 still have not made their major league debut and only two — Tanner Houck of the Boston Red Sox and Trevor Rogers of the Miami Marlins — have generated as much as 2 career WAR to date.
That makes the GM/president’s job even more critical since the draft is a prime avenue for obtaining affordable talent.
What follows is an assessment of the drafting skills of current major league team executives. Of the 30 individuals or partnerships operating big league teams, 20 have been at the task for at least six seasons, long enough to have established some measure of track record.
It’s those 20 we’re looking at.
This ranking assesses the average WAR obtained by each team exec for each draft season. The data includes the exec’s name and team as well as that average WAR production. The average WAR includes all players actually drafted and signed that year, even if a player was subsequently traded or released and produced that WAR for other teams.
The idea here is to gauge an exec’s ability to recognize and sign talent, irrespective of what the GM’s team eventually does with that talent.
The 10 team execs who are excluded — since they have not been tenured enough to have made picks that would reasonably have been expected to reach the majors in any significant numbers yet — are: Kim Ng, Marlins; Bill Schmidt, Rockies; Billy Eppler, Mets; Brian O’Halloran, Red Sox; Eric Neander, Rays; Jim Click, Astros; Perry Minasian, Angels; Mike Elias, Orioles; Chris Young, Rangers; and Thad Levine, Twins.