FanPost

A's draft strategy may need a serious overhaul

I don't know if anyone else saw this article regarding drafting young high school hitters. Let me start you out by linking you to the article in Baseball Prospectus (linked from Minor League Ball).

http://www.minorleagueball.com/2011/10/14/2490086/we-were-prospects-once-and-young#storyjump

The basic gist, for those of you with no time to read it all, is that the highest rates of return for hitters in the amateur draft come from the youngest draft picks. This, obviously, means the youngest high school players. Well I wanted to see how Oakland has drafted hitters over the past 10 years, and how our draft strategy aligns with this newly discovered "undervalued commodity". In short, how many high school hitters have we drafted and which, if any, of our high school draftees was one of the top 5 youngest players drafted.

First off: I only looked at the first 4 rounds for each of the last ten years, which is roughly the first 130 picks.

Second off: I couldn't find the ages of the players drafted on any of the sites I checked (Baseball Reference, Baseball Cube, and mlb.com), which was kind of the whole point! Unfortunately, my search switched to simply "How many high school hitters have we drafted in the last 10 years with our first 4 rounds worth of picks". Without each players age, though, it's not terribly helpful (anyone know where one could find these guys DOB?)

Yordy Cabrera 2010 Pick #60

Aaron Shipman 2010 Pick #92

Matt Sulentic 2006 Pick #96

Chad Lewis 2010 Pick #125

Max Stassi 2009 Pick #123

That's it! 5 hitters drafted from High School in the first 4 rounds in the last 10 years. Unfortunately, I have no idea how young they were compared to the rest of the high schoolers in the same rounds.

I'm not suggesting we should goes balls out and just draft a truckload of high school guys, but somebody in the A's brass has got to have seen this article, right? Don't the A's employ statisticians who are researching better ways to see returns for their investments? Because as I see it now, we're not seeing a whole lot of success in drafting a developing hitters.