This year, Baseball Prospectus has increased its coverage of amateur baseball and the MLB First-Year Player Draft. Over the past eight months, we’ve produced roughly 70,000 draft-related words, and you can find links to them all right here.
This offseason, Baseball Prospectus also joined forces with Perfect Game USA—the premiere baseball showcase/tournament provider in the world—and our newly forged partnership has provided the Baseball Prospectus readership with access to further MLB draft and amateur baseball content from the insightful team over at PG. Finally, both Baseball Prospectus and Perfect Game will continue to roll out further draft content throughout the week (publishing schedule below), so check in regularly this week to make sure you’re teed up for the draft when it kicks off on Thursday evening.
Scouting the Draft—Summer Recaps
Our draft coverage began with a review of some of the top high school and college players to watch coming out of summer wood bat leagues and the prep scouting circuit. Here are links to each entry in the eight-part series:
Scouting the Draft—Events
Our Baseball Prospectus Prospect Team also took in two large amateur scouting events, providing notes on, and video of, some of the top talent at the amateur ranks.
WWBA World Championship (hosted by Perfect Game USA): Last October, Dan Evans, Joe Hamrahi, Jason Parks, and Nick Faleris headed down to Jupiter, Florida for the largest scouting event on the calendar, returning with notes and video aplenty.
Coca-Cola Classic: At the end of February, Jason Parks, Jason Cole, and Nick Faleris headed out to Arizona for the four-team round-robin event featuring some top-tier collegiate talent.
Baseball Prospectus and Perfect Game—Collegiate Coverage
Both Baseball Prospectus and Perfect Game brought BP readers updates from the college ranks, from fall workouts in Wisconsin to live looks at top arms in the draft class:
Scouting the Draft—Draft Preview
In this seven-part series, concluding this week, Nick Faleris provides scouting notes and video on nearly 100 of the top draft-eligible talents, broken down by position:
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Dissecting the Draft
Nick takes a look at the draft process, stepping into the shoes of a front office and putting together a strategy for draft day:
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Feature Pieces |
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Assessing Day 1; Day 2 Options |
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Player Reports |
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JP Crawford |
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Trey Ball (Outfield) |
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Perfect Game USA—Scouting Notes and Mock Draft
Earlier this spring, Perfect Game provided BP readers with its Top 100 Draft Prospect List as of April. This week, Perfect Game is bringing BP readers top-notch notes on their final Top 100 Draft Prospects, as well as their final mock draft on draft day. Below is the publish schedule; don’t miss this excellent draft content!
June 4, 2013: Allan Simpson’s draft prospects 51 to 100, with player reports
June 5, 2013: Allan Simpson’s 26-50 and 1-25 draft prospects, with player reports
June 6, 2013: Perfect Game provides their final mock draft to get you geared up for draft day
If your thirst for draft content is still not quenched, you can find class-wide rankings, state-by-state rankings, top prospect lists, draft chats, player profiles, mock drafts, and much more over at Perfect Game’s draft content link page. If you’re a draft fan and not already a subscriber with PG, please consider supporting our partners through one of their subscription packages.
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I was wondering, is there any way to provide data on the signability of a player or whether they are projected to ask for above, at or less than the slot recommended amount? It was about the only missing piece I could think of if trying to use these resources to try and follow along with the logic your team (or any team) is using when drafting certain players in certain situations.
Thanks again for the great work!
The only time signability numbers leak is when one side believes it to be to their benefit. I prefer to avoid assisting either side -- be it intentionally or inadvertently -- and there are plenty of media sources who are happy to speculate or float rumors.
Perhaps a nice compromise would be to look at profile types that have generally proved difficult to sign and identifying the players that fit into that historical grouping. Would be an interesting research project, as well, so let's circle back up on that at a later date.
Thanks again, both for the feedback and for the kind words.
For example, inevitably a team will select a lower rated player and rather than engaging in the typical knee-jerk fan reaction of assuming the front office made a mistake by passing on more talented players I would love to know to the extent possible that perhaps the lower rated player was selected because maybe the team projects previous selections to require over slot to sign and so they took the best of those remaining predicted to be singable under.
I like the idea of studying this by breaking players in to similar groups to see what trends can be identified. I appreciate your work on this and hopefully it will help me understand why my team (NY Mets) do what they do.