The Ale-X-Files: Going to WAR in the First 10 Rounds of the Inaugural Draft

Last week's preview of this article asked two questions:

1. Which teams got the most value [this season] from their first 10 picks in the draft?
2. How important were those top 10 picks? (IE could we have predicted the success of a team based on the results of it's first 10 rounds?)

"Value" would be defined as WAR. Here's a quick look at the WAR scale for a player in a single season: 8+ MVP Quality, 5+ All-Star Quality, 2+ Starter, 0-2 Reserve.

(All data compiled can be found here: WAR Numbers First 10 Rounds)

Some of the answers may surprise you while others may not.  First, though, lets look at a couple of interesting items with regard to WAR and draft picks that may set the stage for what you'll see in the team picks:

WAR's Golden
Boy, Steve Frend

WAR Notes:

• Three players managed double digits in WAR this season.  All three of them came within the first four picks in the inaugural draft:   Frend 13.4 (pick#3), Z-Rod 11.1 (pick #4), and Maurice Gould 10.5 (pick #1).  The missing link is #2 pick Mike Bergeron, who finished with a 2.9 WAR in 125 games.
• The most late value (in the first 10 rounds) was Craig O'Day (pick #228), who generated 6.8 WAR.  For comparison, only two other players taken in RD 10 ended up above a 2.0 WAR.
• The highest WAR producing hitter taken outside of round 10 was 3B Kevin Carey, who managed a 6.5 WAR and was taken in the 15th round George Sanders, taken in RD 17 with a 7.1 WAR.
• On the pitching side, it was Charles Luce, who produced a 5.1 WAR between two teams while taken in the 18th round.  (I'm actually a bit stunned this 31 year old starter fell this far.) 

First Question:  Who got the most value?

Now let's take a look at answering those two questions.  The first one (who got the most value from their first ten picks) is easy.  Here are the teams ranked in order of WAR based on their first 10 picks (format is WAR Rank/Team/WAR/2012 wins):

1 Seattle:   40.2/98 wins
2 Las Vegas:  38.8/95 wins
3 Montreal: 37/95 wins
4 Maple: 35.5/90 wins
5 LA: 32.9/94 wins
6 Montgomery:  32.3/92 wins
7 San Fran:  29.6/88 wins
8 New York:  28.5/85 wins
9 Minnesota :  28.5/101 wins
10 Cabo San Lucas:  27.2/88 wins
11 Ann Arbor:  27.1/88 wins
12 Boston: 26.8/102 wins
13 KC:  25.9/80 wins
14 Dallas:  25.2/89 wins
15 Carolina: 19.8/70 wins
16 Mile High:  17.9/82 wins
17 San Diego: 17.9/78 wins
18 Jersey:  17.4/81 wins
19 Nottinghamshire:   14.8/52 wins
20 Greenville:   12.3/67 wins
21 Eureka:  10.6/73 wins
22 Jax: 9.8/64 wins
23 So Cal: 9.6/34 wins
24 S.C:  6.7/61 wins

*Traded players only counted for their original team (in order to be more accurate, I should have included the WAR of the player(s) they got in return.  For this season that was minimal so it wasn't included but may be in the future.

*In the linked document, you'll see I  included Pick # because the discussion of where picks were made and how that affected the team success was brought up this week.  I think this gives a better view of that, and while the numbers are weighted slightly towards the front of the draft for this league, it's more balanced than the playoff picture itself alone.  More studies and samples (other inaugural drafts) would be needed to see if the front of the draft had an advantage, and that might be an interesting question for another time.

Second question: How important were those top 10 picks?

• Clearly it is of some importance, as no team under 20 WAR (10 ABL teams) for their first 10 picks won more than 82 games.
• Also, at the very top, it seems like a good predictor of success, in that the first six teams, who had 30+ WAR, won over 90 games and five of them made the playoffs.
• Much more interesting, though, especially to me, is that the two best records ranked #9 and #12 on this list.  I remember Boston being talked about early in the draft (around their first few rounds of picks) as looking like one of the best teams.  The prediction turned out to be correct, but it doesn't appear it was because of their early drafting.   

Conclusions:

• The teams that got the most out of their first ten rounds (top 25%) were very likely to make the playoffs and were guaranteed to be competitive. 
• On the flip side, while being a top team in WAR in the first ten rounds seems to guarantee competitiveness, being one of the top teams in WAR doesn't appear necessary to be competitive.   It appears that significant gains can be made  beyond RD 10.(as demonstrated by BOS, DAL, and MIN, as well as a couple of other teams that earned more wins than teams ahead of them in this study).   Examining my own team (because of the incongruity and I've looked at them the closest), I had thought I drafted really well in the first 10 rounds at the time.  Looking back now, I am shocked that in the first 10 rounds, I was only at about 50% success rate of drafting even starting caliber players!  Boston on the other hand, was much more balanced, picking 7 of those types of players and more that were near the all-star caliber.
• In order to be competitive in an inaugural season, it appears there is a threshold of production you need from your first 10 picks.  That threshold seems to be around 2 WAR p/pick or at least averaging a big league starter with each pick.   This leaves a lot more room for error in the first ten rounds than I expected.   Id need to do further study on this, but my guess would be because "finds" in later rounds are much more rare so the gain is significant.   RD 9 and 10 seems to indicate that might be the case. In those two rounds, only 13 of 48 players were of 2.0 WAR or above and the 10th round only produced 3, but this could also be due to overall draft strategy, like a heavy weight in those rounds toward prospects.

Future Thoughts:  

• I plan to continue to look at this and see how the numbers change, especially for teams that drafted for the future.   I'm very much looking forward to keeping track of this as the seasons continue
• I was amazed at how much could be analyzed from this perspective, like breaking it down by position or in order to decide whether it was worth drafting middle before a certain round in terms of average WAR but I just didn't want to go that far into it at this time.  Also interesting would be to look at average value p/round....the possibilities seem endless.