The Long Bad Buy

Our long National League nightmare is over. Two and a half weeks and 750 draft picks after it began, the NFBC slow draft is done. Though we used it primarily as preparation for our NFBC Main Event draft in April, we weren’t opposed to success, though it may seem that way when you review what we did.

Our draft can be described, accurately and justly, as “high-risk, high-reward.” It can also be described, with equal accuracy and justice, as “feeble.” Laugh and weep with us as we explain what we were planning to do, what we thought we were doing, and what we actually did. And that’s right, wise guys, it was in fact a mixed-league draft, but we liked our opening line too much to jettison it.

Our strategy going in to the draft was animated by several insights, or, if you prefer, delusions. They were:

–To compete in such a league, you have to do well in all categories, and you can’t punt any. So category concentration matters. Only a few guys are going to get you saves, and only a few are going to get you stolen bases in wholesale lots. If you lock up the players who will do those things relatively early, you have the leisure later in the draft to go after guys who will enable you to do well in the more abundant categories while everyone else is struggling like squirrels in February for saves-and-steals subsistence.

–Stolen bases, by themselves, are relatively cheap. The problem is that guys like Jarrod Dyson and Jordan Schaefer generally don’t get you anything else, and thus are a drag on your lineup overall. The SB guys you want do other things as well.

–Premium closers are worth, well, a premium. Closers who have a long and unbroken history of success in that role at an elite level are better bets than pitchers who don’t, even the ones who’ve been lights-out closers for a couple of years. For us, “long” means at least three seasons, and “unbroken” means that Koji Uehara doesn’t make the cut after 2014’s late-season misfortunes. On our list were Aroldis Chapman, Craig Kimbrel, Greg Holland, and (somewhat more marginally) Kenley Jansen and Steve Cishek. Why not Jonathan Papelbon? Because for some reason (possibly because he is demonstrably a jerk), he never makes these lists.

–There really is such a thing as position scarcity, certainly in leagues that require two starting catchers, and (we think) for middle infielders as well.

–On the other hand, there were some catchers who weren’t going to go until late in the draft and whom we expect to hit some and play some: Wellington Castillo, Josh Phegley, Mike McKeniry, J.R. Murphy, Max Stassi, Tomas Telis.

–Starting pitchers are unpredictable and unreliable. We’re willing to take a shot on our own expertise in selecting mid-round starting pitchers rather than springing for Kershaw in the first round, Hernandez in the second, or Sale in the third. We know there’s a school of thought that holds exactly the opposite.

–We’re skeptical about the likely first-round power hitters after Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen. Who knows how Giancarlo Stanton will react to his beaning? Who knows how Goldschmidt’s wrist is? Surely Miguel Cabrera’s injury will compromise him?

We were drafting in eighth position, squarely in the middle of a 15-team league, which means it was our turn every 15 picks. The first thing we discovered is that it’s hard to implement a “strategy” in that position. You pick one guy, and by the time your turn comes around again, the guys who’ll help you pursue that strategy in that particular round are gone. So we wound up doing the worst possible thing: improvising, then pursuing the strategy, then improvising some more, and so on. Here’s what happened. Each pick is listed in terms of our overall draft position. The number in parentheses is the NFBC Average Draft Position. If we think the pick is self-explanatory, we won’t explain it.

8. Paul Goldschmidt (5). As you will have deduced, the guy who fit our first-round profile was Jose Altuve. And he was available when our turn came. But so was Goldschmidt. (Trout, McCutchen, Stanton, Cabrera, Abreu, CarGo, and Kershaw had already gone.) His availability induced a spasm of reappraisal. Was it likely that he’d recover fully from his particular injury? The people who make a business of answering such questions told us it was. Assuming he’s healthy, was there any reason to think he’d be less than the consummate go-rilla he’d been for a while? None whatever. Was there any extant information about his condition? Nothing illuminating; the Diamondbacks might as well be the Kremlin. All we could learn was that he’d begun “swinging the bat,” which is consistent with glowing health but also with his hand’s having fallen off. So we took him.

23. Michael Brantley (21). By this time, Altuve, Cano, Rendon, Tulo, Ramirez, and Desmond were gone among the middle infielders. We could have taken Dee Gordon. But we didn’t like him as a second-round pick. We think the second-half decline we detected in our pitch study was real, and that he will revert to being a one-category player. We considered taking Butch Posey, who went with the next pick, but since we liked some cheaper catchers, we took Brantley on the theory that he was the best SB-heavy multiple-category player left. We think what Brantley showed last year is who Brantley really is. Our beloved editor recognizes that Brantley’s growth can be viewed as “organic and steady,” but thinks it’s at best a 50-50 shot that he’s as special as he looked. We’ll take a chance.

38. Victor Martinez (40, though it was lower when we made the pick). You have perhaps guessed that this was before his knee injury, from which he is expected to return sometime between tonight and 2016, depending on whose prognosis you believe. Both then and now, though, he can be seen as an uninspired pick. But wait. He was also probably the best player left in the draft: not just a member of the shrinking Brotherhood of .300 Hitters, but a guy whose magnificent 2014 was real, as suggested by his xBABIP and his elite contact skills. Plus, his home runs weren’t gimmees, but rather “no doubts” and “plentys,” and he’s in the middle of a very potent lineup. Or he was….

53 and 68. Aroldis Chapman (45) and Greg Holland (58). These were the first of our picks that corresponded to what we’d planned on going into the draft. We knew that top closers were going as early as the 4th round, and we’d expected all along to do this. Chapman was the first closer taken; we’d have taken Kimbrel next, but he was gone, and we prefer Holland to Jansen.

83. Kolten Wong (102). We discussed him in one of our previous posts. We probably could have waited a round to get him, but why bother? We like him.

98. Elvis Andrus (128). This was a panic selection, as well as a vestigial attempt to pursue our original strategy. We were in the 7th round, and looking short on SBs. Middle infielders who’ll get 25-plus SBs? Let’s see. There’s, uh….? To paraphrase John Lennon, after Elvis there was nothing.

113. Jorge Soler (126). It had become clear that we needed to take some risks. Soler is young and something of an unknown quantity, but he’s in the middle of what is starting to look like a high-powered offense, and it’s easy to envision him producing numbers (25 HR, .270 BA) like the ones you can expect get from David Ortiz or Adrian Gonzalez, who are 4th or 5th round picks.

128, 143,158. Hyun-Jin Ryu (154), Dallas Keuchel (248), Marcus Stroman (164). We had some power, some speed, a couple of middle infielders, two elite closers. There was no catcher we couldn’t wait for. Time to start assembling a staff of starting pitchers. The original plan was to take 5 SPs in a row, but we got sidetracked. We could have taken Carrasco, DeGrom, or Gonzalez instead of Ryu, and we could have taken Latos, Wacha, or Cashner instead of Stroman. But hey, Fangraphs is our Bible, and Fangraphs says that Ryu has been and should continue to be “one of baseball’s outstanding pitchers,” and that Stroman has learned how to channel Roy Halladay, or anyway Roy Halladay’s sinker. Defensible picks. As for Keuchel, we think he figured something out last year: how not to give up home runs. We’re not sure how this happened, but we don’t see any stat, however arcane, that leads us to think this wasn’t a genuine, and hence meaningful, development. It looks to us like that, by itself, made the difference between a marginal major league pitcher and a mid-rotation or better starter. So we’re believers. None of which is to say that we wouldn’t rather have Colin McHugh, or someone else that we couldn’t have waited another five or six rounds to get. Gracious comment of Birchwood Brother responsible for this pick: “My bad.”

173. Yasmani Tomas (151). We realized—belatedly, the hard-hearted among you may say—that (1) we didn’t have a third baseman, (2) we needed one, and (3) there was no one available that we especially liked, or anyway didn’t think we could wait for: Prado, Ramirez, Headley, Lawrie, Plouffe. At precisely that moment—some will see in this a Divine Hand guiding all human activity, others will see the random play of atoms in a universe governed only by the merciless laws of physics—we learned that Tomas (outfielder and recent Cuban defector with otherworldly power, given enough money by the Diamondbacks to start a decent-sized private equity firm) would be auditioned at third base. We remember Pedro Guerrero, so we’re skeptical about outfield-to-third base conversions. But all we need is 10 games there from Tomas, and then he’ll qualify at the position. So, in a flash of inspiration, we took him. This would come to cause problems later on. And as it turns out, we’re probably going to wind up using him in the outfield anyway.

188. Yasmany Grandal (198). Perhaps due to a subliminal suggestion attributable to homophony with our previous pick, we noticed that Yasmany Grandal was still available, and brooded about whether we were really willing to start the season with a catching team of Wellington Castillo and J.R. Murphy. No, we thought, on the whole, we’re not, and since we’re not crazy about Derek Norris (see the chart in our Manifesto), it looked like a long way to the next-best catcher, so we took Grandal.

203. Ian Kennedy (179). We were surprised to find him still available. Lots of strikeouts, great home ballpark, and the only starter on the team who didn’t do substantially worse when pitching outside of San Diego.

218. Curtis Granderson (252). Looking at home run projections for the season, we noticed that two superannuated sluggers—Granderson and Byrd—were still available. Both are on the shady side of their careers, and could turn into automatic outs overnight, but for different reasons, we kind of like both of them. Playing half his games in Cincinnati should go some way to neutralizing age and regression to the mean for Byrd. As to Granderson: the Mets have moved their right-field fences in. We assume that even they have figured out that, if you move them in when the Mets are at bat, you have to keep them where they are when the other team is batting. We also assume that they are using some reasonably sophisticated sabermetrics, and that, after looking at the same insanely detailed data we’re looking at, they’ve concluded that they’ll gain more home runs than they’ll lose. Granderson, a dead pull hitter, is presumably an important beneficiary of this. Indeed, Met GM Sandy Alderson has said that, according to team data, Granderson would have hit seven more home runs last year if the fences had been where they’re going to be this year. That makes 25, and a decent 15th-round pick, even with the foreseeable further decline.

233. Taijuan Walker (260). A challenge pick by us. Why isn’t he getting more love in Fantasyland? We get why his organization is blathering about his having to compete for the fifth starter position. This motivational technique, if that’s what it is, has Lloyd McLendon written all over it. Walker went into 2014 as the top pitching prospect in baseball, and during September that’s what he looked like, especially in his starts against Toronto and Oakland in a couple of high-stakes games. We could have waited for him and taken many other guys (including his teammate James Paxton) instead, but we didn’t. We will endure your scorn with patience.

248. Trevor Plouffe (276). What with Tomas not qualifying at third base yet, we still didn’t have anyone to start the season at the position, and Plouffe was the only guy left among the third tier of third basemen. Actually, we kind of like him, because his 2014 was better than it looks. He increased his walks, reduced his strikeouts, made above-average hard contact, and hit 40 doubles, which put him in the 2B/PA Top Ten. If he keeps making good contact and some of those doubles clear the fence, he’ll hit .270 and 20 or 25 home runs, and if he doesn’t he’ll still be adequate. And just in case he isn’t, we drafted Miguel Sano later on.

263. Luke Gregerson (258). We don’t care what the depth chart says. We think he will be Houston’s closer, because by every possible metric he’s a better pitcher than Chad Qualls (though not necessarily Pat Neshek).

278. Stephen Vogt (348). He doesn’t qualify at catcher yet, but with Derek Norris gone he’s looking like the strong side of a platoon at the position with Phegley, so he will, at which point he will bring above-average power and BA to the position. Meanwhile, we knew that later on we could (and eventually did) get Phegley, whom we also like, to hold the fort at the position.

293. Nori Aoki (313).

308. Kyle Hendricks (291).

323. Jose Ramirez (353). A “stopgap,” sniffs Fangraphs, until Francisco Lindor—preceded, we gather, by the angel Gabriel—arrives in Cleveland. Uh-uh, hotly rejoin we. As a 21-year-old last year, Ramirez held his own offensively and defensively in the majors, is a career .306 hitter in the minors, and will steal 30 or more bases if he plays every day. In the middle of a playoff race, Terry Francona, who is a pretty good manager, started Ramirez and batted him 2nd in the lineup 38 times during the last six weeks of the season. Ramirez responded with a .283 BA and 10 steals in the second half. If you take the Ramirez projections from the Bill James Handbook (James, in general, tries to answer the question “how will this guy do if he plays?” as opposed to “how much will he play”?) and plug them into Jeff Zimmerman’s SGP rankings (which is the kind of partial equilibrium analysis we hate, except when we like it), you get a top-10 shortstop. Maybe there’s a trade, maybe Kipnis remains MIA and Ramirez slides over to Second Base, maybe Lindor needs a full year at triple-A. In the 22nd round or for $1, he seems irresistible.

338. Ender Inciarte (386). Our heartthrob.

Gee, thanks for listening, Doc! We feel better about our draft now. Coming next time: a summary of the second half of our draft. But finally and sadly: RIP Dave Bergman, a 17-season major leaguer, a graceful and sure-handed first baseman, and the best hitter on the 1975 Double-A West Haven Yankees, in whose company we spent many a pleasant summer evening avoiding the work we were supposed to be doing at the time.