Down on the Farm - 7/11/22

Draft week! We take a look at historical draft results in the NL East, Pete Crow-Armstrong (CHC) goes 3-3 with a homer, TJ Sikkema (NYY) punches out 11, Nate Eaton (KC) homers twice

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Draft Week!

This week will be dedicated to the MLB draft, which takes place July 17th-19th in Los Angeles, CA. There won’t be a “Draft Preview” or a mock draft. We aren’t even going to discuss the 2022 draft class. I find mock drafts to be pretty pointless and there are plenty of great resources out there to find breakdowns for all the players in this year’s draft class — Baseball America and Fangraphs are good places to start. Instead, we’re going to look at macro-level draft trends and how organizations have drafted over the past 10 years or so. Each day we’ll take a look at a particular division and break down each organization’s results from the draft.

National League East

The plot below displays drafted fWAR by all organizations since 2010. Although the Astros are in the lead by quite a bit, the Mets have also done fairly well in the draft. The Angels, Tigers, and Yankees have accumulated the least amount of value through the draft. Out of organizations in the NL East, the Phillies have accumulated the least WAR from the draft out of any team with just ~60.

We’ll go in order of the current standings, meaning the Mets are up. But first, here’s a look at the player each NL East club has drafted who has accumulated the most WAR since 2010. As you’ll probably notice, we’re focused on the players a club drafted and how they’ve performed across their career — meaning for this exercise it doesn’t matter if a player didn’t accumulate their value with the club that originally drafted them. Christian Yelich is one of the best examples. For our purposes, he’ll still count towards the Marlins WAR totals even though he’s accumulated a large chunk of that value after he was traded to the Brewers. Analyzing traded value can get messy, so we’ll save that for another day.

New York Mets

Despite trading or not signing three out of their last four 1st round picks, the Mets have been one of the best organizations in baseball when it comes to extracting value from the Rule IV draft. Crazy, I know. Sure, they’ve had their misses, but every organization does over the years. The Met’s average pick position since 2010 has been 14.2, meaning they’ve been right in the middle of the pack. Jarred Kelenic at #6 was the highest pick they’ve had and Anthony Kay was the lowest at #31. Kay was taken in 2016, a year in which they had two first round picks and also drafted Justin Dunn at #19.

The Mets have done well with their premium picks, taking players such as Brandon Nimmo, Michael Conforto, and Matt Harvey, who’ve all had strong careers. Although it still hasn’t fully played out, trading Kelenic could end up being a good decision, despite the fact that it has been widely panned since the day it happened. Brett Baty is hitting .277/.373/.469 in Double-A and looks like a potential big league regular.

The Mets have also been able to find value in the later rounds of the draft, taking players such as Jacob DeGrom, Chris Flexen, Jeff McNeil, and Tylor Megill all after the 2nd round. Finding big leaguers in the later rounds is difficult enough, but drafting players who end up being All-Star caliber players is very rare. The Mets have pulled it off a few times over the past decade.