Archive for MLB Draft

Last week, I introduced some data on the MLB Amateur draft, and focused on some trends throughout the entire draft. I looked at the value of different rounds and compared the value of different years as well. For this week, I am going to focus on players drafted in the first round using draft data from Baseball Reference. I chose to isolate the first round since that’s where we tend to see the most successful players on average and will also help eliminate most of the players who were drafted twice, even though there will still be some players who were drafted twice in the first round. This data also includes players who were drafted, but never made it to the majors. Without further ado, let’s dive right in.

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The popularity of amateur drafts in sports has been rising for at least the last decade or so. Just take the NFL draft that used to be a Saturday and Sunday event that now begins primetime Thursday, where people have draft parties and events based around the NFL draft. Think about that for a moment. No sport is being played and no athletes are competing live. People are spending countless hours preparing for an event where players are just being selected. During this time, everybody is a college football and draft expert and lead on to knowing more than the so-called “experts.”

The MLB amateur draft is not quite at that level yet, but the fact that it is now televised is interesting in terms of how quickly the popularity of the MLB draft is, or at least how popular major league baseball wants to make it. I’m fascinated how much stock people take in the draft considering most people have never really watched these players in high school or college, so the general public really has no clue who these guys are, unlike college football where a lot of these players were watched by a large audience every Saturday, whether it was active or passive watching.

This brought up some curiosity on my part. Thanks to Jeff Zimmerman, he did a tremendous job of providing me all the data I needed to start exploring my curiosity into the MLB draft using a great data visualization tool, Tableau Public. I didn’t have an exact idea about what I wanted to learn. I just wanted to explore the MLB draft from the beginnings to now. I had no preconceived notions, I just wanted to see if there were any trends I could find/or not find based on the data. So I plugged the data in and began looking around. I found some things that make sense, some things that don’t, some trends that are obvious, and some that really don’t exist.

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Gavin Cecchini started the 2013 season where he ended it, in the Class-A (short season) New York Penn League, with the Brooklyn Cyclones. But the Penn League was not a proving ground in 2012, as he only played in five games, starting just one, and pinch running in the other four.

The shortstop, 20, has begun the season productive, consistent, and was noticeably bulkier than last year; he approximated he put on about between 10-12 pounds, in a conversation in early June. Regularly hitting second or third in the lineup, he’s had a hit in six of the eight games the Cyclones have played. He put together a five-game hitting streak, collecting three multi-hit games in that stretch.

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