Five Years of WAR: Part 1, The Not-So-Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

After the 2012 Season, I took some time to look at the first 10 rounds and tried to evaluate the success of each team's draft based on the amount of WAR produced.    I intended to follow it every year, but life got busy and it's a lot of work, so there hasn't been a report until now.   It's a nice time to do it, though as it will cover five years since the inaugural draft.

So, here's Part I of your half-decade report.  This part will focus on the bottom half of the teams.

I'll link my full spreadsheet after Part Two, which will focus on the top half of teams.

As usual, a couple of caveats:

• These are still based off of the original team's draft choices.  So when you see phrases like "NOT has x WAR" it really means that NOT's inaugural draft selections have produced x WAR, not they they've benefitted from all that as they may have traded players away.
•  I briefly considered trying to follow trades to see what teams got back, but that became convoluted quickly.  Consider this analysis what each team would have had if no trades were made, which brings me to my second point....
• Most of these players have actually, amazingly, remained on the same teams.  I don't have an exact number, but I'd say roughly 80%, however, some big names have moved that would alter numbers, though some not until this season.
• These numbers do not include this season and all numbers refer to the ABL production (minor league is not included) of the  top 240 picks in the inaugural draft (10 from each team) from 2012-2016.  This means that when I refer to Boston below as not having a player to produce 20 WAR in that time, they may have had one (and probably do), they just didn't have one in their top 10 inaugural picks.

Team WAR

Without further ado, here are the twelve teams whose top ten picks produced the lowest WAR from 2012-2016, along with their (current) franchise records and playoff appearances:

Rank	Team	2012-2015 Team WAR	Record from 2012-current	Playoff appearances
13	San Diego	96	434-511	1
14	Eureka	94.8	517-429	2
15	Jersey	94.6	438-508	0
16	Oklahoma City	93.8	513-435	2
17	San Francisco	88.8	482-465	1
18	So Cal	85.9	452-494	1
19	South Carolina	85.7	413-534	1
20	Carolina	85.3	444-502	1
21	Mile High	81.5	447-499	1
22	Boston	74.2	497-449	3
23	Washington	72.3	400-545	0
24	Jacksonville	26.1	350-596	0

Notes:

• There were 14 total playoff appearances from the bottom half and seven of those came from three teams.   There were 26 from the top half.  Still, it's clear that not getting a lot of production from the first 10 picks wasn't insurmountable, though it clearly made things tougher.  It's worth noting that none of the bottom half of teams have produced a championship either.

• Boston Cardinals: While you'll find that there are far more playoff appearances in the top 12 teams, Boston has made three playoff appearances despite getting just 74.3 WAR from it's top 10 picks.  The Cardinals are just one of three teams that has three playoff appearances. (There are also three teams with four).   Boston has also managed to do this without a single player to produce more than 20 WAR.

• Jacksonville Jacks: This week, Glenn mentioned redoing the inaugural draft as a joke and saying he probably couldn't do worse.  He's probably right.  26.2 WAR amongst 10 players over 5 years is pretty abysmal.  There are 21 players in the first 10 rounds that produced more than Jacksonville all by themselves, and one player nearly doubled that (he needed just 0.5 more WAR to do so).

Individual Efforts in Futility

While overall, this is focused on teams, here are the players who produced a negative WAR over that period of time:

Team	POS	Player	Total
Mile High	SP	Manuel Lopez	-2.9
San Fran	LF	Ken Wade	-2.8
Jacksonville	C	Cal Godleman	-1.8
So Cal	SP	Chris Clark	-1.8
Mile High	SP	Kurt Taylor	-1.7
Nottinghamshire	2B	Peter Kelly	-1.3
S.C	SS	Angelo Casas*	-1.3
Carolina	CF	Lawrence Buchanan	-0.7
Mile High	LF	Danny Hardy	-0.6
Washington	CF	Nate Davis	-0.5
Carolina	SP	David Cole	-0.3
Cabo San Lucas	CF	Mark Bennett	-0.2
Jacksonville	OF	Ivan Ortiz	-0.2
San Diego	SS	Trevor Warner	-0.2

• Of that list, OF Nate Davis and SP Manuel Lopez managed to make an appearance in all five seasons, and, for now, Lopez holds the honor of biggest bust amongst the players I looked at.   It's worth noting that there was another Manuel Lopez who was also worth -WAR (-1.1), so I'd stay away from guys with that name.

• OF Ken Wade was allowed to be terrible just two years ('12 and '13) before being sent back down and he is now retired at the age of 28.

• Additionally, there are three players who have not appeared in a single ABL game that were top 240 picks (as of the end of 2016):

OKC	2B	Dave Nichols*
Jacksonville	SP	Kirk Snyder*
Montreal	C	Alfredo Villalobos

All three of these players happened to be 10th round picks.

• Nichols is 25 in AAA.

• Snyder was also a 10th round pick and is actually up and having a very good year with Jacksonville this season as a 23 year-old

• Villalobos is also 23 and is in AAA.

Wasting Away in Margaritaville (Least ABL Use)

Finally, as I was going through this, it was also interesting to see how much ABL use the teams had gotten out of their top 10 picks.   Each team picked 10 players over five years.  That's 50 total years of service that each team could have seen out of its first ten picks.   I'm not going to examine every team, but some teams picks have seen far more ABL use than others.  I'll bring it up the teams that got the most use out of their players in the ABL in part 2.

• Most of the teams used the players in this study 80% of the time, meaning that there were really only a handful of seasons of 50 that their top 10 picks didn't see the ABL.

• Only three teams top 10 picks saw 80% or less of ABL time in the last five years.  That's essentially two whole picks that have, so far, gone unused.

• It's probably no surprise that Jacksonville's top 10 picks have seen the fewest ABL seasons, netting a grand total of just 30/50, or 60% of the time in the ABL.  This is a staggering four total picks worth of seasons that were not used during that time.

• The only other teams to have 10 or more "missed" seasons were San Fran (10) and OKC (14).

Final Thoughts

• While it clearly wasn't necessary to draft well and get production out of the top 10 rounds, as shown by OKC, BOS, and EUR I think you'll see that teams that did draft well and got more production there, unsurprisingly, had a much easier road to success.

• At some point I'd like to further study the development and success of both OKC and BOS.  OKC was in the bottom half in WAR and and usage of players, while BOS was only ahead of two other teams in WAR, though they did get a lot of use out of their players the last five seasons (44/50 total seasons).   EUR is an interesting case, too, but they were much more a bubble team in this analysis and had far more use for their top 10 picks, so they didn't have both the challenges that OKC did.  Did these teams make good trades, get more out of their later picks, have random talent increases, or something else?

•  I realize that Jacksonville features pretty heavily, and thankfully it looks like they're turning things around in Year 6.   However, I'd be curious to know if Glenn would change his approach in drafting, which seemed to focus on younger, long shot prospects and require a lot of trust in his scout and their development. Or  did he he set up for long term future success starting now and thinks the five year wait was worth it.

• There are five ABL teams that haven't reached the playoffs.  Frankly, I expected to see them all on the list for Part 1.  However, there are two teams that got significant production out of their top 10 picks and still have yet to reach the playoffs.   We'll find out who they are as well as the teams that had the most production out of their top 10 picks in the next installment.