FanPost

Tanking is Stupid, Part 1: So you think you can draft

Patrick Gorski-USA TODAY Sports

This is the first of a multi-part series, which will take a shot at blowing up the tanking myth. Tanking is not a baseball success strategy. It does not lead to winning championships. Losing is not a desirable outcome.

"Tanking" is purposely putting a worse team on the field than you ultimately could, in order to gain assets that you hope will help in the future. Actions that qualify as tanking include:

- offseason trades of currently useful players for prospects

- allowing a free agent to walk, without having an equal or better replacement available, knowing that you will receive a compensatory draft pick

- shutting down quality players late in the season

Note that deadline trades of major leaguers to contending teams, in exchange for prospects, do not count; these are deals made when you already suck, and/or are trading players that you cannot or should not keep. Many teams have found themselves in the position of the 2015 and 2017 Tigers - teams who thought they could contend but floundered instead.

In Part 1, we will study draft results from 1995 to 2012 to show that higher draft picks are at best very loosely correlated with success.

The 2004 MLB draft was, at first glance, a travesty of fairness. The 2003 Detroit Tigers had come within a couple days of setting the all-time record for losses, and such futility would've ensured the #1 pick in the NFL and NHL* drafts and at least won the most lottery balls in the NBA. Major League Baseball's rules of the time, however, carried over from the days when the two leagues were still considered more separate than today. The top pick (in fact, all picks) in the draft alternated between American and National League, and 2004 was the NL's year to pick first. So the legendarily bad Tigers had to wait until the third-worst team in baseball - the San Diego Padres - made their selection.

Unwilling to pay the salary demands of college standouts Jered Weaver and Stephen Drew, the Padres selected high school shortstop Matt Bush - and the Tigers dodged a bullet. Bush was, by all objective measures, an asshole who sucked at professional baseball. Unable to hit even the lowest of minor-league pitching, he was converted to a pitcher, arrested frequently, and released by organization after organization. Bush finally made it to the majors in 2016, but as of this day, has still spent more time incarcerated than on a major-league roster.

With a five-tool shortstop off the board and also unwilling to pay the demands of Weaver and Drew, the Tigers settled for a strikeout-artist from Old Dominion University named Justin Verlander.

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Stories like this abound. The MLB draft was instituted in 1965, and for the first 50 years of the draft (that is, through 2014) not even half of all first overall picks even so much as played in an All-Star Game. That's right - the first overall pick is more likely than not to fall short of expectations. Even the list of All-Stars includes such luminaries as Mike Moore and Phil Nevin - players who had a good season in the middle of mediocre careers. The exact number of MLB first overall picks in the Hall of Fame is: one.**

It turns out that it's really hard to project the careers of 18- and 21-year-old baseball players. All you can do is pick the best ones and hope they develop. Weird things happen. The LA Dodgers are the best team in baseball right now, and their closer was signed as a catcher. Their center fielder was drafted in the 4th round as a shortstop.

Besides all that, we could fill an encyclopedia with "star A was drafted after bust B" anecdotes. Or, "busts B, C, D, E, and F." Anyone interested in those can pick any MLB draft they like and find them. Here, we'll take a slightly more scientific look.

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To do that, I studied drafts from 1995 to 2012, stopping at that year to give players half a chance to make the majors. I made a grid of the career WARs of each player drafted from positions 1-60. For any pick that didn't make the bigs, I assigned a career WAR of -5 (not zero, because a great many players made the majors and had a negative career WAR - this should be considered better than never making the show at all). Here is the average career WAR per pick:

  1. 18.7
  2. 14.8
  3. 8.6
  4. 5.8
  5. 12.3
  6. 4.1
  7. 10.0
  8. 4.7
  9. 6.9
  10. 10.3
  11. 6.4
  12. 6.3
  13. 3.2
  14. 3.3
  15. 4.8
  16. 4.8
  17. 6.8
  18. 1.4
  19. 3.7
  20. 7.3
  21. 1.1
  22. 5.0
  23. 1.3
  24. 0.1
  25. 4.7
  26. -2.5
  27. -1.3
  28. 1.6
  29. 0.6
  30. -0.7
  31. -0.2
  32. -1.7
  33. -2.2
  34. 0.5
  35. -0.6
  36. -0.9
  37. 0.9
  38. 5.2
  39. -1.4
  40. -0.3
  41. -0.9
  42. -0.8
  43. 0.1
  44. 2.0
  45. -1.3
  46. 2.8
  47. -2.3
  48. -0.8
  49. 2.8
  50. 1.3
  51. -3.4
  52. 1.4
  53. -1.4
  54. -0.3
  55. -2.3
  56. -0.6
  57. 4.3
  58. -0.7
  59. 0.7
  60. 2.0
Here we move from the anecdotal to long-range averages - and we are still flooded with "star A was taken after bust B" stories. On average, from 1995 to 2012, the 6th overall pick has been outperformed by the 57th overall pick! The average career WAR of 6th picks is only 20th overall among picks. Of the top ten best-performing picks, only six are actually top ten picks.

Another count we can take from this data set: how many players at each pick failed to make it to the majors. Here's that list:
  1. 0
  2. 1
  3. 3
  4. 2
  5. 6
  6. 7
  7. 4
  8. 7
  9. 4
  10. 1
  11. 6
  12. 3
  13. 6
  14. 4
  15. 5
  16. 5
  17. 7
  18. 5
  19. 2
  20. 3
  21. 6
  22. 4
  23. 7
  24. 7
  25. 5
  26. 10
  27. 9
  28. 5
  29. 11
  30. 7
  31. 8
  32. 7
  33. 10
  34. 5
  35. 6
  36. 6
  37. 7
  38. 5
  39. 10
  40. 10
  41. 7
  42. 9
  43. 6
  44. 6
  45. 10
  46. 7
  47. 9
  48. 11
  49. 7
  50. 8
  51. 11
  52. 8
  53. 8
  54. 11
  55. 10
  56. 10
  57. 6
  58. 7
  59. 7
  60. 12
If we say that one goal of a draft pick is to get a major league of some caliber, then the only picks with better than a 5-in-6 chance of making the bigs are 1, 2, 4, 10, and 19. That's right - more 19th-overall picks than 3rd-overall picks made the bigs. That #6 pick rears its ugly head again with 7 complete failures to make the bigs. Other picks performed equally as badly (including the 8th pick) but only three picks in the top 30 performed worse: #26, #27, #29. I want you to remember the horrible performance of #6 picks at least til the end of this article.

The only pick "guaranteed" to make the majors is #1, but that's only because I stopped before 2013 - Mark Appel is in AAA with an ERA somewhere north of 5 and no longer with the organization that drafted him - meaning that the "huge investment in this guy" incentive to force #1 overall picks to the bigs even if they suck, just to roll the dice.... doesn't exist.

Lastly, maybe the point of the draft is to get the biggest star in it. You can't win a World Series without them, and you'd expect the #1 pick to be it. Or you'd at least expect to find that guy in the top 10. Here's where the top player in career WAR*** has been picked in each of these drafts from '95 to '12:

1995: 49th
1996: 46th
1997: 16th
1998: 20th
1999: 52nd
2000: 15th
2001: 1st
2002: 6th
2003: 37th
2004: 2nd
2005: 5th
2006: 7th
2007: 48th
2008: 5th
2009: 25th
2010: 13th
2011: 6th
2012: 1st

Finally, the maligned 6th pick comes through with two "best picks" - although one is very recent (that's Anthony Rendon) and the jury is still out. Thank goodness for Zack Grienke in 2002 or the 6th pick would be even more of an embarrassment. Top-ten picks are slightly more likely to be the best in the draft than picks below the first round. Slightly.

Of course, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to say that over the long term, higher picks will generally perform better than lower ones. The linear correlation coefficient of "overall pick" vs. "average career WAR" is -0.72 for picks 1-60. (A perfect correlation is either 1 or -1, depending on the slope. Here, overall pick goes up and career WAR goes down, more or less.) But when taking only the top 20 picks, that coefficient goes down to -0.67. And in real tank territory, the coefficient gets even worse: -0.58. In other words, the higher you get, the less correlation there is between pick and success. Bad teams have a better chance of finding gems than good teams, but really bad teams don't really have a better chance than regular bad ones.

There are lots of factors to this, naturally. One is that individual players all develop differently. Some organizations scout better than others. Some develop players better than others. Sometimes you get a flake, or worse, a lazy brat with a raging temper, also known as Matt Bush. Sometimes players have major signability problems - and you have no idea who they are during the previous August and September, because they haven't had their high school senior years, or their college junior years, and they haven't signed with Scott Boras yet.

Admittedly, we have established over the long term that it is generally better to pick high than low - but we have also established that it is not necessarily better, and may be much worse, to move up a pick or two, even over the long term. But tanking teams don't pick over the long term, or so they hope. They get nothing more than a couple short-term decisions. And over the short-term, success is almost entirely randomized (or dependent on quality scouting and development) - which is why anecdotal evidence is so powerful in a case like this.

Thus it makes no sense at all to try and move up a couple places in the draft. By the time your draftee makes it to the majors (if he makes it) several years will have passed, and everything will have changed. Everything. Your draftee could undergo two Tommy John surgeries, you could find the 7th-rounder rocketing up the minors, you could sign a guy from Cuba playing that position, a free agent could land in your lap, or the guy you gleefully landed in front of some sucker of a team that tried too hard might just kinda stink. Too bad your scouts couldn't tell you that - and they couldn't tell you that regardless of where you picked in the draft.

I told you to keep in mind how badly the 6th overall pick has performed. Even over the long term, 6th picks are worse than most players taken after them. For some time the Tigers were the 8th worst in the league. Thanks to the losing streak that the Tank Train gang has celebrated.....they're now 6th.

Better hope Zack Grienke is sitting there, instead of Barrett Loux sandwiched in between Drew Pomeranz and Matt Harvey.

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In Part 2, we'll study some poster boys for tanking and demonstrate that even if what they did could be considered tanking, it hasn't helped.

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* the NHL draft lottery was not instituted until 2006

**until Chipper Jones and Alex Rodriguez are added; that will make three.

***ignoring picks 61 and below, which, if the best player is found there, only serves to make this article's point even stronger

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of the <em>Bless You Boys</em> writing staff.