This is complete bunk.

The Giants previous five first round draft picks in that range of the round:

2003 #22 - David Aardsma
2002 #25 - Matt Cain
2001 #30 - Noah Lowry
2000 #21 - Boof Bonser
1999 #24 - Kurt Ainsworth

All five pitched in the majors; two brought significant value on the mound, and the other three had trade value.

That Kansas City drafted poorly is meaningless. No one who has ever done a quantitative analysis of the MLB draft has ever concluded that it's a good idea to toss away your first round draft picks.

Stop being apologists for Sabean. These are low-percentage moves. That in one particular case they don't appear to be all that bad is irrelevant.

If he's got one solid prospect back in return for that #29 pick, one should be happy. As gdog astutely points out,they are low-percentage moves.

According to Martin's analysis/research (if I remember right), picks that late in the first round have not even a 10 or 15 percent chance of sniffing the majors. So why does it seem that people cry over one skipped draft pick?

It's not like baseball draft picks are like NFL draft picks. A first rounder isn't a sure-fire starter. Heck, most of them aren't even surefire AAA players in the long run.

Kelvin Pichardo is a nice haul from that draft. At 19, he would have been the equivalent of a high school draftee (maybe one year post-highschool). So in two years, he's already progressed to doing well in a notorious hitter's league. He's right on track with where you expect most high-school draftees (even first rounders) to follow. Maybe three to five years from the time they're drafted. He's making solid time. Lets see how he does in AA or AAA next season.

I think these actions are unrelated and rely too much on poor decision making by other franchises. Just because the Royals drafted a bust doesn't mean we would have, as gdog pointed out. But even more important than that, the Phillies decided that a few months of a fading Michael Tucker were worth Kelvin Pichardo. An absolute steal by Sabean given Tucker's value, which was awfully close to zero. Sabean deserves a lot more credit for this deal than he receives, but he didn't sign Tucker expecting to trade him.

The Giants might have drafted Huston Street or Hunter Pence but, yes, there's a greater likelihood that they would have ended up with someone like Matt Campbell. Even in the worse case scenario, there's a good chance that our pick would at least have had some trade value a year or two later. We'll never know, but the principle of intentionally punting a draft pick is what bothers me.

Totally agree that punting the draft pick makes absolutely no sense. It's folly to think that this is a good strategy, especially when the player you are punting it for (Tucker) was complete crap. As others have noted, just because KC didn't draft a valuable player in that position doesn't equate to what anyone else would've done. This is not something for Sabean to be congratulated for. Congratulate him for getting something for Tucker, but not for unwisely giving up the draft pick when he could've waited one day and gotten Tucker and kept the draft pick.

This is what I think people conclude, that there was a principle that Sabean followed. I think that is just erroneous. He gave up #29 because he was on a limited budget and wanted to divert the money to the big club. What he didn't know is that Bonds would go down, not just for the year of this strategy ('05) but for the next year, too.
Secondly, I think people over simplify. They look at a move or at a couple of years and believe they know everything about Sabean and his strategies.
What I think gets ignored are the facts that 1) he has seriously changed his strategy and 2) he is rebuilding right under our noses. He most definitely is concentrating on the draft; and it is not just pitching. His strategy now seems to be pitching + middle of the diamond, meaning drafting fast, toolsey, defensively superior players for C, 2b, SS, CF, and (because of the particularities of ATT) RF. And there are lots of middle IFs and potential CFs in the system, particularly lower down, from more recent draft.
Regarding the rebuilding, he now has our rotation set for several years, with more coming. He is in the midst of building the pen. I don't think he's going to get another Stanton, I think he is willing to wait for our current pen and Fresno' pen to mature. And by and large, these pitchers are young and cheap (with one exception). He now has money to spend on position players. True, several players are signed for next year. But he needs a foundation, he can't just go get 9 new position players. But there will be some new ones, and we have the money for FAs and the chips for trades.

Thanks for the plug Lefty!

I would like to also add that I covered the 10 picks after the 29th pick, and only 2 of the 10 can be said to be doing well enough to satisfy people, Eric Hurley, #2 on BA's Top 30 prospects for Rangers and Giovany Gonzalez, #3 ChiSox. Most of the rest rank in the high teens on prospects list, and a few are already out of baseball.

Now people look at this and say, "See, the Giants could have gotten Hurley or Gonzalez and then they would have been able to trade him for something, he could be a valuable trading chip."

The fact is that approximately 10% of prospects in that draft range turn out to be good players (about 20% are useful, then 70% either are career minor leaguers or never get more than a cup of coffee in the majors).

Pointing at the successes and saying that proves their point, is the same as a lottery ticket winner pointing at their $100 prize and saying "see!" without looking at the $1,000 he just spent buying all those lottery tickets.

And as someone noted, it was not a simple matter of getting both, there was enough money to get one or the other, not both. Can you imagine if the Giants didn't sign Tucker and only had Hammonds and Mohr playing RF?

Mohr was good, but as his play in the season after showed, he was playing above his head in limited at-bats (BABIP of .351 vs. RHP, .363 BABIP in SF) and most probably would have played about as well as he did in 2005 when he hit .214/.280/.466/.746 had he played full-time instead of Tucker, who hit .252/.350/.409/.759, which, while slightly better in OPS, was infinitely better in OBP, which is actually more important than SLG, OPS is just an approximation that is simple to calculate and compare. If you like Mohr's line, then you must really love Pedro Feliz.

I was going to write on this at my blog, but another way to look at this is to compare the WARP contribution of the two choices, Tucker or the pick. According to Baseball Prospectus' data from their draft study, which came out a few months after mine, the 29th pick of the draft averaged slightly under 5 WARP over their career.

Now a lot of people point at this study as refuting my study, but the point of my study is that the distribution of talent is horribly skewed to prospects who do very little in the majors. But even if you look at the average of almost 5 WARP, guess what? Michael Tucker delivered 5.1 WARP over the two years he played on the contract he signed with the Giants.

So, the Giants got the equivalent of what the average 29th pick delivered over a whole career (OK, actually only over the first 15 pro years of a career but close enough) with Tucker AND they still got a valuable pitching prospect in Kelvin Pichardo who is doing well in Advanced A San Jose right now.

Now, I'll admit that the 29th pick is a low point in that stretch. However, consider this: picks 29-33 averaged 8.4 career WARP; picks 24-34 averaged 8.5 career WARP; picks 30-39 averaged 7.7 career WARP. So picks in that range generated, on average, roughly 8 WARP over their career. So that's more than the 5 for Tucker and whatever Pichardo generates.

So it becomes a time value problem. Do you want 5 WARP in the next two years, or would you rather wait out 5-6 years, and then generate 8 WARP over a 3-6 year period? Because the average player does not generate that much WARP, Tucker averaged 2.5 per season himself with us.

To give perspective on what 8 WARP is, Doug Mirabelli has generated 14.4 WARP during his career, Marvin Benard has 19.6 career WARP, Pedro Feliz has generated 17.3 WARP himself thus far. They are all far better than the average 21-30 range pick, Pedro twice as good, Benard more than twice.

Most people spit upon Feliz's performance each of the past two years but he generated a total of 9.2 WARP - more than the average career WARP generation for a 29th-range pick of about 8 WARP, and that is 8 career WARP, not over a 2 year period.

You hate Neifi Perez? He has generated more than 4 times the 8 WARP: he has 35.4 career WARP and counting (though he can go negative and lose some). During his two years with the Giants? 4.2 WARP.

People didn't care much for Ponson (I thought the trade was good though) but his WARP is 31.1, almost 4 times the 8 average WARP. He generated 7.0 total WARP in 2003, the year he split between Orioles and Giants.

How about the immortal Mario Mendoza, he of the Mendoza Line of futility? He has a career WARP of 5.2, better than that of the average 29th pick.

To sum up, people who bemoan the loss of the 29th pick basically love the performance of Pedro Feliz over the past two years, or the performance of Sidney Ponson in 2003, because the WARP are about the same.

So yeah, there might be some value at the 29th pick, but do you want that value (on average)?

And at 10% chance, basically most of that 80 WARP generated over 10 draft picks in the 20's range is done by one player, with maybe 20-30 generated by another 1-2 picks. That is basically Bill Mueller (45.5 WARP) plus Michael Tucker (30.4 WARP) plus Lance Niekro (2.2 WARP) plus Jason Ellison (1.9 WARP) for a total of 80.0 WARP. So, would you rather go for the sure thing and get Tucker for two years, or take the chance that it might take you 10 years to find a Bill Mueller or Michael Tucker in the draft, meanwhile you have to draft guys like Linden and other guys who never even make the majors?

Looking over Boof's comment, that has been exactly my point with my study: sure, you may think Michael Tucker is crap, but 8 times out of 10, when you are picking at the 29th spot, you get something exponentially worse than crap, you get nothing for your $1M in bonus money (or the baseball equivalent of pocket lint, the prospect who come up for a cup of coffee).

And when you get lucky, you get Michael Tucker or a good fascimille of him, on average. So why not just get him now, instead of paying $10M over a 10 year period to find him?

People just don't seem to understand exactly the type of talent that is available late in the first round, I've been beating my head in trying to find an example to explain why I think I'm right, and hopefully the above Michael Tucker example finally drives my point home: it is a needle in the haystack trying to find someone good late in the first round, so bypassing one hay pile doesn't hurt your chances of finding one much.

Now, if they did it indefinitely, then it would be a problem, but, as I wrote in my original analysis, I think they did it for as long as you can and still get away with it.

I hope to rewrite it, update some stuff, use the Tucker example above, and hopefully people will see what I've been beating the drum over for a number of years now.

Oh, and I love Inspector Clouseau, my favorite line of his ever is, after taking the mace off a suit of armor and destroying a piano, the owner screams, "That is a priceless Steinway!" and Clouseau spits out, "Nut Eni-moore".

Impressive research and analysis, ogc, but I think if you rewrite it your arguments would be better served without the emotional tricks. Don’t let all of your research and analysis get lost amongst distractions like “You hate Neifi Perez?” That stuff isn’t really an intellectually honest representation of WARP or the draft pick study.

WARP derives a lot of its value from defensive contributions, so choosing historically awful hitters like Perez and Mendoza (and a locally maddening hitter like Feliz) is misleading. Feliz gets more than twice as much WARP from his glove than from his bat, and Perez and Mendoza are sub-replacement hitters who essentially get more than 100% of their WARP from their gloves.

“To sum up, people who bemoan the loss of the 29th pick basically love the performance of Pedro Feliz over the past two years…” Or of David Ortiz, Frank Thomas and Travis Hafner, who averaged about 7 WARP while finishing 3rd, 4th, and 8th in the AL MVP voting last season, if you’d rather cherrypick in the opposite direction. Sidney Ponson was having a great season in 2003 for Baltimore and pitched okay for the Giants as well; I’m assuming you picked him because most Giants fans remember a bad playoff outing and a sad late career. You did all this meticulous research and then you try to distract us from it by getting us all worked up about that damn game against the Marlins. Stupid Marlins!

“And at 10% chance, basically most of that 80 WARP generated over 10 draft picks in the 20's range is done by one player, with maybe 20-30 generated by another 1-2 picks. That is basically Bill Mueller (45.5 WARP) plus Michael Tucker (30.4 WARP) plus Lance Niekro (2.2 WARP) plus Jason Ellison (1.9 WARP) for a total of 80.0 WARP…”

Okay, this seems like a reasonable enough distribution to me. 20% of the time you get a solid player, 20% of the time you get a near-miss, and 60% of the time you strike out. Oversimplified, but reasonable. I might choose Aramis Ramirez (39.2 WARP) and Adam Dunn (35.0 WARP) but that wouldn’t really be fair since they’re both still productive. I’m with you so far.

“And when you get lucky, you get Michael Tucker or a good fascimille of him, on average. So why not just get him now, instead of paying $10M over a 10 year period to find him?”

Well, as you’re well aware, the forfeited draft pick didn’t get us Michael Tucker and his career WARP; it got us Michael Tucker for a portion of one season. We saved $1.1M by forfeiting the draft pick, which paid for about 100 games of Michael Tucker’s $1.75M annual salary. Prorating this to his first (and best) season with the Giants gets you about 2.5 WARP. It wasn’t a bad contract by itself; the question is, was it worth the forfeited pick? The math gets trickier here, even if we start with an even simplified version of your simplified scenario: 20% of the time you get a 40 WARP player, 80% of the time you get nothing. So, it takes five #29 draft picks and $5.5M to pull in that 40 WARP player and have him for three cheap seasons and three submarket seasons.

Then it comes down to how much he produces early in his career and how discounted his contracts are. Using your examples, the Giants got 17.5 WARP and Tim Worrell out of Bill Mueller before he ever pulled in a serious payday. The Royals got only 4.5 WARP out of Tucker in a year and a half, but they turned him into Jermaine Dye, who racked up 21.4 WARP before being turned into… Neifi Perez? Damn. Well, don’t let that poor trade distract you. In either case, these teams would have been better off in the long run spending the $5.5M to find these players than getting five little 2.5 WARP chunks of a veteran.

These are only two examples, and I don’t know if they are representative or not. But this is where the heart of the matter lies, not in a competition to find the most distasteful players who have racked up the highest WARPs.

I don't think anyone is really saying that punting a draft pick and signing a veteran is a great idea. I surely don't intend to argue that point. I'm just saying that it's not as bad of an idea as many people make it out to be. It's not some blasphemous sin against building a baseball team. It's one of the options a GM has, and like most options, it's neither really bad or really good.

The bottom line here is that the Giants did not have to punt the pick. They could've waited one day to sign Tucker and kept their pick. It's a potential prospect pissed away for no good reason. Whether or not the potential prospect will statistically turn out to be a ML player or not is irrelevant. They took away an opportunity to possibly get a plyer in exchange for nothing. Sorry, you can point to all the statistical probabilities that you want, it does not justify the strategy.

Like Pantalones, I think the problem is linking one act to the other. Clearly, having a year of Tucker, the future of Pichardo, AND the #29 pick would be better yet than just having Tucker and Pichardo. And had that's what they would have ended up with if they had waited a few hours to announce the signing. If they didn't have enough in the budget to sign their June draft picks (and the idea that those two expenditures are coming from the same operating budget is pretty iffy), then let the guys from rounds 30 on down be the ones you don't sign, not the guy in Round 1.

Also, Martin's right about the statistical probabilities, but I think he draws the wrong conclusion. To me that suggests you need more prospects, not less, to try to make the economics and statistics work for you.

>If they didn't have enough in the budget to sign their June draft picks ...then let the guys from rounds 30 on down be the ones you don't sign, not the guy in Round 1.

But it's possible that the Giants figured the cost/benefit risk of the lower rd players that year was better than the cost/benefit of a late Rd. 1 player.

It's similar to the argument whether it's better to sign one high-priced FA or several low-cost FAs with a finite bundle of money -- until the Zito signing, the latter was the Giants' MO, i.e., no Barry AND Vlad on the same team.

> To me that suggests you need more prospects, not less, to try to make the economics and statistics work for you.

Isn't that kind of like saying if you have a 10% chance of winning at slot machine X, you should play it 20 times rather than 10 to improve the potential winnings?

Pretty much, sfgfan. The difference is that most people believe that over time, this particular slot machine pays out well over 100% of what it takes in.

Thanks for the reasoned commentary, I appreciate it.

OK, I see that I muddied the waters with my writing. Point taken. I'll simplify here.

A draft pick is like a lottery pick. The odds of you holding a winning ticket is very low, around 10% (not 20%) for a good player, 20% for a usefull player like Tucker. I was trying to fit the constraints of the 80 WARP and threw Mueller in but I don't consider Mueller to be a good player, he's a useful player to me. Good are the players you listed, pantalones.

Forfeiting one pick doesn't change the odds of you finding a good prospect appreciably, so why not divert that money to the MLB payroll and get a useful player today?

Now continually punting one? Suicide for the farm system. Once or twice? It can be a useful strategy to get a useful player when you need one, and the Giants needed one.

Tucker was paid $1.5M, bonus saved was $1.1M, but long term, they also save whatever they would have paid that prospect each year in salary and any other payments (per diem?) he may receive. So that's basically equivalent.

But good point, it doesn't pay for his second year. I'll have to rethink things out regarding that and maybe throw out that as part of my argument.

Still, punting that one lottery ticket doesn't materially change your odds of "winning" by finding a good player. That's the main point I'm trying to make.

About my selection of names, I was trying to find WARP examples to fit the BP stats that are familar. However, on your end, David Ortiz was a free agent, Frank Thomas was the #7 pick overall so he would never have been available at pick #29, and Hafner was not drafted until the 31st round, showing how lucky you can be sometimes late in the draft, like the classic Mike Piazza pick.

People still think the Giants could have had both. The way I view it, perhaps if Sabean were given that choice, then he would have taken it. Sure, having a pick is better than having no pick.

But if Magowan wasn't giving him the $1.1M to spend and he really didn't have the money and had to chose, I think punting the pick is defensible, the odds of finding a good player is reduced immaterially, in my opinion, by doing that.

I found something that reports something similar to what I've been saying about the odds. Ron Shandler has a free newsletter and here is his latest column:

RON SHANDLER'S MASTER NOTES
Fruitful source of stars?
With this week's excitement surrounding the first year player draft, it's always good to do a little reality check. Everyone was focused on #1 pick David Price, in fact, there was great attention on every first round pick. After all, these are baseball's future superstars, right?

Well, not really. Let's take a look at the last decade's worth of first rounders and gain a little bit of perspective. Here are the #1 picks from each year and the first round players who have become stars.

Year #1 pick First round picks who became MLB stars
==== ================ =========================================
1996 Kris Benson E.Chavez
1997 Matt Anderson JD.Drew, T.Glaus, V.Wells, L.Berkman
1998 Pat Burrell JD.Drew, M.Mulder, B.Lidge
1999 Josh Hamilton J.Beckett, B.Zito, B.Sheets, B.Myers
2000 Adrian Gonzalez C.Utley
2001 Joe Mauer M.Teixeira, M.Prior, J.Bonderman
2002 Bryan Bullington P.Fielder, N.Swisher, S.Kazmir, C.Hamels
2003 Delmon Young
2004 Matt Bush J.Verlander
2005 Justin Upton R.Zimmerman
2006 Luke Hochevar
For those keeping score, that's about two dozen MLB stars out of 296 first round picks (omitting 2006 since it's too soon to see the fruits of that draft), a rate of 8%. On #1 picks alone, the best we can say is that most of them became at least serviceable major league players.

So, while the first year player draft is an interesting exercise, as far as fantasy relevance, it does not seem to be a percentage play we should be obsessing over.

ogc: that's all I'm been trying to say, it is not a percentage play. Using his example and assuming that rate applies to the #29 pick (this is on the high side because it includes the #1 pick; so that's conservative), it would take 296 years of round 1 drafts to find about 24 MLB stars. Or about 12 years to find each star.

So if you punt the pick, what's more likely, that you are punting the one star or the 11 non-stars?

But, Martin, you're not looking for 24 stars - you're looking for one or two. And those tend to come from the first round. Giving up your first round pick WHEN YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO is ludicrous. If your budget is so tight that you can't afford to sign a first round draft pick and simultaneously field a ML roster, your accountants need to be fired and new ones hired.

Or, on the same note, if your organization can't draft and sign a ML hitter after 10-15 years, you've got to have some accountability somewhere.

What gets omitted is the possibility that Sabean looked at the players in the draft and concluded that for #29, for that particular year, his chances were lower than usual, that he would still have to pay the $1.5 Mil bonus, but it would be to a player not appreciable better than, say, what he could get at #52. This is the same sort of analysis NFL teams go thru. If the have the #20 choice and there are 10 players expected to be available at #20 who all grade out the same, the smart thing is to trade down, to #28, say, get just as good a player at a significantly reduced price.
It seems kind of inconsistent that the same people who blast Sabean for 'not producing any position players,' criticize him for passing on ONE pick to pick up a useful position player.

I will repeat again since some of you don't seem to make the connection. The useful position player, and I use that term very loosely in Tucker's case, could have been acquired AND THE PICK COULD HAVE BEEN KEPT. One has nothing to do with the other. They very easily could have done both. It is a BS rationalization that links the 2 things.

And I think that it is BS rationalization that people cannot accept that in business situations, you cannot just buy everything in sight, that you can and must make choices between one or the other.

If Sabean is denigrated for not producing position players, then what about the teams who do not produce top rotation pitchers?

The Dodgers have been highly praised over the past 5-6 years for their farm system, and all of their pitchers have been higher rated than our pitchers, even Matt Cain, and yet we have Cain, Lowry, and Lincecum in our rotation and the closest they got is Billingsley, and they are in such bad shape that they got Brett Tomko to start for them.

How about Cashman? How many good position player or even starting pitching developed since Brian Sabean left the Yankees? Chieng-Ming Wang and Cano, who else have they developed in the same time frame?

What about the Braves? How long has it been since they produced a good pitcher?

It's not about whether or not the prospect pans out. We already know that most of them do not. However, pissing away a shot at a prospect who may or may not pan out for no apparent reason is ludicrous. There is no way that it can be justified when they could've waited one day and signed Tucker and kept the draft pick. The money that would have to be paid to that draft pick could've been made up anywhere, like paying Barry $1M less for instance. The explanation that it was one or the other is complete BS. They are not related, at all. The only relation is drawn by a GM and others who tried to rationalize his error in the first place.

.....and besides, I'd rather have an 8% shot at something than a 100% shot at nothing, which is the option that Sabean and his honchos opted for.

There's a lot of grasping at straws here to defend the Giants. Lefty - how would Sabean, in November, know whether he should punt the 29th pick the following June? And we keep forgetting here that he did it again for the 2005 draft and would have lost his pick again in 2006 had the Giants not had such a bad record.

We can argue about trades and signings, but in this case, we know that Sabean intentionally gave away his pick three years in a row.

While Tucker makes a nice cherry-picked comparison because his contract was relatively small, the Armando Benitez deal doesn't look very good ($21 million for 5.4 WARP.)

The other thing to remember is that if Sabean had drafted (instead of punting) and been unable to sign a player within his budget, he would get another pick the next year. The Benitez deal shows he was no longer under the constraints of the previous season, so the "business decision" argument no longer applied.

Let's face it: Sabean was wrong about this.

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