Nationals Arm Race

"… the reason you win or lose is darn near always the same – pitching.” — Earl Weaver

38 Responses to 'One Month into College season check-in on top 1-1 candidates'

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1. Doyle intrigues me. He weighs 30+ pounds more than Arnold and looks more like an MLB pitcher. With Arquette, I have difficulty getting excited about a 6’5″ guy who hasn’t shown big power and doesn’t have a position. Law’s scouting report on him was extremely meh.

   I’m looking more closely at Kilen. Thirteen of his 16 games have been at the UT bandbox of a stadium, but half of his eight homers came in the Astros’ stadium against legit foes OK State and Rice (two homers in each game). He’s definitely a riser to watch, particularly as he hits SEC play. He’s not built like Holliday or Arquette, but that also makes it more likely he can stay on the dirt.

   Honestly, I don’t know where Holliday sits on this spectrum, or how potential improvement might be evaluated against weak HS competition. I guess the big things that can be seen are contact rate and plate discipline. In my mind as of now, Holliday is a fall-back if some college players don’t really excel. Waiting (and waiting and waiting) on another contact-challenged teenager doesn’t fit into the grand scheme of things with the Nat right now.

   I guess my board right now would be Doyle-Arnold-Arquette-Kilen-Holliday. A lot can (and will) change in conference play, though, particularly in the SEC.

   

   KW

   10 Mar 25 at 8:03 pm
2. I get a little worried about college guys destroying low-rent Div1 Programs early in the year suddenly becoming top 10 draft candidates.

   None of these pitchers are Skenes. None of them are even really Cavalli. I see Alex Wood side arm slingers who get college guys out. Great. I want guy who can fill up a uniform and a strikezone.

   

   Todd Boss

   10 Mar 25 at 10:54 pm
3. Thanks for doing these running updates. In case you missed it, FanGraphs has integrated Division I baseball stats into their site, which for me has been huge. BBRef already did it, but FanGraphs’ leaderboards (and all their configurability) make this much more interesting. Here’s the link: https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders/college

   Speaking of GMU, James Quinn-Irons is currently the 2nd best hitter in all of NCAA D1, with a silly slash of .574/.649/1.016.

   In playing with the leaderboards, something I noticed is that there’s a surprising correlation between OPS/wRC+ and draft position, at least in 2024.

   For example last season, the D1 leader in wRC+ (229) was Travis Bazzana, who went… 1-1. 4th highest wRC+ was Charlie Condon, who many expected to go 1-1, and dropped all the way to 1-3. 6th highest wRC+ was Jac Caglianone, who appropriately went 1-6. Also of note, the guys with the 2nd, 3rd and 5th best wRC+ were drafted in the 17th, 4th and 5th rounds, seemingly due to age/defensive inflexibility, but all 3 posted well above average numbers in short stints in 2024.

   The same holds true for pitchers. Best FIP in 2024? Hagen Smith (1-5). 2nd best? Trey Yesavage (who surprisingly tumbled to 1-20, but was still the 4th pitcher drafted), 5th best? Chase Burns (1-2). 3rd best went in the 2nd round and 4th best was none other than Jamie Arnold.

   In 2023, the leader in FIP was Skenes (1-1). In 2022, it was Cooper Hjerpe who went 1-22 and was the 6th pitcher drafted.

   Frankly, I’m pretty surprised how connected the stats are to draft position. I know there’s other factors like age, defensive ability, conference quality to factor in, but I’d have thought there’d be less strong of a connection between relatively straightforward combination stats like wRC+ and FIP, given the scouting and projectability that goes into these things.

   

   Will

   11 Mar 25 at 4:45 am
4. On the actual 2025 draft candidates, I’d proffer a few more names to the watchlist:

   Wehiwa Aloy – SS from Arkansas, who’s presently batting .433/.534/.850
   Marek Houston – SS from Wake Forest, who’s hitting .415/.518/.831
   Ethan Conrad – CF and teammate of Houston, hitting .359/.494/.734
   Devin Taylor – corner OF at Indiana, hitting .382/.500/.765
   Luke Stephenson – a catcher from UNC who can hit to the tune of .321/.493/.607

   A few arms:
   Kyson Witherspoon – SP at Oklahoma, 6’2″, 23 IP, 40 K, only 11 H allowed, 5 BB (you couldn’t design a more prototypical “Rizzo guy” if you tried. Ok, maybe add 2 inches to his frame).

   Speaking of which, don’t tell Rizzo about Chase Shores, SP from LSU. Dude is a tank: 6’8″, 250 lbs! So far his numbers have been merely good (3.15 ERA, 22:7 K:BB, 20 IP). I wonder if he might be more of a 2nd round option?

   Altogether, it’s still very early, but it’s looking like Doyle might be having a Skenes 2023 moment, while Arnold is slowly and steadily continuing to be dominant. And Gavin Kilen is looking a lot like a Travis Bazzana 2.0.

   Will be interesting to see if these guys can sustain their play, and whether guys like LaViolette or Bremner can bounce back. But barring some truly historical season from Doyle, it’s looking like a distinctly unconsensual 1-1 pick. Will be curious to see how Rizzo approaches such a situation.

   

   Will

   11 Mar 25 at 6:23 am
5. LaViolette is going to have a hard time bouncing back into top-of-draft contention after such a feeble start against non-conference patsies.

   It’s definitely an interesting year to be picking 1/1. It’s going to be important to look for someone who can be a solid contributor. Those who want to gamble on getting a star are still going to be looking at Holliday.

   

   KW

   11 Mar 25 at 6:45 am
6. @Will; fangraphs links are great, i’ll add them to the post going forward.

   1-1 pick: Lots of pundits talking about how there’s no Skenes in this draft, which means whoever goes 1-1 will take a big haircut off of whatever the 1-1 slot pick is ($11M?), which means we’ll be able to throw millions more at our 2nd and 3rd round picks, netting essentially multiple 1st round talents this year. We got Dickerson for $3.8M in the beginning of the 2nd round and I suspect we’ll do that twice this year.

   

   Todd Boss

   11 Mar 25 at 9:14 am
7. Indeed, in the absence of a traditional 1-1 talent, the big win of the draft lottery was gaining about $3-4m more in pooled spending. If, say, picks 1-6 are more or less similar in quality, we’ll almost certainly be able to find one of them willing to sign for substantially less than 1-1 slot value. There’s huge value in going 1st, if only because it’s the only pick you’re guaranteed to get the guy you want, and can pre-negotiate a deal without any need for contingencies and negotiate guys down from the full slot value that they will never get at 1-2 or later.

   The Guardians saved $1.6m on Bazzana this way. The Pirates incredibly took the same approach in drafting Skenes (saved $500k), the O’s saved $600k on Holliday, and the Pirates saved nearly $2m on Henry Davis. Rutschman, Mize, Lewis, Moniak and Swanson all took less than slot at 1-1. Funnily enough, the only 1-1 pick to not sign for underslot in the past decade is potentially the worst 1-1 pick of the past decade: Spencer Torkelson, who signed for slot in 2020.

   

   Will

   11 Mar 25 at 9:58 am
8. Considering what looks like the lack of anything close to a “generational talent,” I would think that all the teams at the top of the draft will be looking for significant savings to put toward other picks. I could see the Nats offering, say, Doyle and Arnold $9M and see who bites.

   The Angels, picking #2, are both desperately in need of pitching and also have used recent high picks on middle infielders, which seem predominant at the top of the draft aside from pitchers. Unless any of the college OFs really explode (another real area of need for them), I would think that they’re going to be laser-focused on Doyle, Arnold, or maybe Bremner if he rebounds. They also love guys who they can rush to the majors, so they’re likely picking a college player.

   Seattle, picking #3, is interesting in that the Mariners are a contending-quality team and may even be one of the AL West favorites. Rarely does a team coming off 85 wins pick so highly. You would also think they want a collegiate who can help quickly, probably an infielder.

   Interestingly, Holliday might end up with one of the two teams with which his dad is most associated, Colorado (picking #4) or St. Louis (at #5).

   

   KW

   11 Mar 25 at 6:17 pm
9. Honestly, lets say that the Nats really liked Holliday before this season started, and now he’s been passed. Do they go to him and say, “ok you’re projecting to 6th pick so we’ll give you 5th pick money at 1-1” and get the guy th ey wanted all along? Then they’d save something like $5M, which could buy them two more 1st rounders.

   

   Todd Boss

   11 Mar 25 at 8:19 pm
10. I would think that a high schooler would have a lot less incentive to take a deep discount, all the more a discount to mid-first-round money.

    If the Nats wanted to go for a deep discount, it would be interesting if they offered an amount $3M less than slot to someone like Wehiwa Aloy or Devin Taylor who hasn’t really been projected in the top 5-7 picks and might be pleased with the thought of $8M or whatever. That’s about the deepest discount I would think that you could get. Someone like Bremner might take that now as well.

    

    KW

    11 Mar 25 at 9:10 pm
11. Everything is in flux so much right now, though. There are so many guys who weren’t even on the top-10 radar during the preseason who we’re already discussing even before conference play begins. When the season started, I’m sure most of them would have been thrilled at the idea of a $5M bonus. Then there are a few like Bremner and LaViolette who already likely have lost millions, and I’m sure they know it and are feeling the stress.

    

    KW

    11 Mar 25 at 9:14 pm
12. When the Pirates took Henry Davis 1-1 in 2021, they paid him $6.5m of a $8.41m slot value, or 77% of the slot value. I can’t find the exact value of 1-1 for 2025, but it’ll be more than $11m. If you use Davis’ deal as a model, that would be around $8.5m, so you’re pretty on point KW.

    Aside from the Nats, it’ll be a really interesting draft for picks 2-10 as well. If there’s so little consensus on 1-1, imagine the variability of 2-10, which is always a crapshoot even when there’s consensus top 10s, like last year.

    

    Will

    12 Mar 25 at 6:39 am
13. Todd, that’s the benefit of going 1st in a non-consensus draft. Even if you like Holliday at 1-1, you need to convince him that you don’t like him, plant the seed he’ll go 6th or later, and then convince him to sign for way below slot.

    But the problem with using the draft savings in later rounds, is that there’s not often “great” value after round 1 (or rather outside the 10 of round 1), even with unlimited money. The Nats’ 2nd pick comes in at pick 49. In 2023, the best guy on the board at 49, was Walker Martin, who MLB ranked 30th best prospect in the draft (next was Jake Gelof, ranked 35th, who went at pick 60). So at 49, you’re getting a guy who tumbled a bit, but isn’t absurdly good value for the pick. Then in round 3, the Nats have pick 81. The best guy on the board at 81 in 2023 was Cam Johnson, who tumbled all the way to the 20th round, and didn’t sign with the Cardinals and opted to go honor him commitment to Oklahoma, he was rated 42nd best prospect. Cole Schoenwetter, the 43rd best prospect, went 103, so he was an option too.

    All of these guys will exclusively be HSers, due to their bonus demands.

    So all that to say, if you banked huge savings on 1-1, you could turn your 2nd round pick into a 30th best prospect. And your 3rd round pick into a 42nd best prospect. You might even have some money left over to turn your 4th rounder into a top 50/60 prospect.

    But we also know that the player quality drops off massively outside the top 10. The difference between the 30th pick and the 49th, for example, is negligible, so how much additional value are we really getting this way? But then again, if this is the best hand we have to play, any advantage is well worth it.

    

    Will

    12 Mar 25 at 6:56 am
14. Will touches on something that confuses me every draft about these HS kids who demand and get overslot deals.

    I get that, for a lot of these kids, going to college is a real option. They have a commitment to a top school, college sounds fun, etc. For each of them there’s some line ($X), and if the bonus doesn’t reach it, they’ll go to school. Fair enough.

    And I get that teams scout these players and make their projections and, given the pool constraints, decide on a number ($Y) that such a player would be worth. And if the player’s minimum acceptable bonus ($X) is higher than $Y, the team won’t draft that player. And every year a couple of players who were scouted as possible 1st rounders end up going to school because no team is willing to hit their commitment. That’s all clear.

    What I don’t understand is what happens in situations where $Y > $X, and how players are able to capture that surplus as well as they seem to do.

    Take for example a player who has an internal decision point at $2M (ie that’s the number below which they will go to school). And further imagine that multiple teams value him as a good signing at $2M or higher and the one with the highest valuation on him is willing to offer hi $3M. Let’s say that’s the Nats and our plan is to get this guy with #81.

    What I’d expect to happen is that some other other team who likes this guy would grab him in the 2nd round and offer him $2.5M. (The team doesn’t know the $2M number, so we can’t assume the team captures the whole surplus.) Would a player really refuse to sign for $2.5M because some other team would have given them $3M? I doubt it. At least not very often.

    But what actually does seem to happen is that all the other teams respect the high bidding team and/or the probably fictitious threat of not signing for a lower but still significant amount and just let the player fall to the agreed upon draft slot.

    Which is all to say, I don’t understand one iota how it happens, but empirically it looks to me like those overslot 2nd and 3rd round picks actually are late-1st round talents and not the passed over subset of guys scouted to go higher pre-draft.

    

    SMS

    12 Mar 25 at 8:17 am
15. @Will: one additional factor for prep kids to consider: NIL money. While it isn’t nearly as much as football & basketball players are getting .. it’s not nothing, especially at larger SEC and ACC programs. I’m not sure NIL will be a make or break thing right now (i.e., it isn’t $1M/year, which could be a 50% of their bonus demand) but its certainly something.

    I suspect, to your open question about what goes on behind the scenes, that teams call players (like the Nats did with Dickerson) and basically say, “we’re looking at you in the third and we’re willing to go overslot, what will it take.” And player goes, “3.9M.” And nats go, “ok.” And from that point onward, when teams call Dickerson in the 1st and 2nd and say, “will you sign or $1.8 or will you sign for 2nd round slot at $900k” he will say, “No i have an agreement for 3.9” … and that’s that. The teams don’t have enough time to haggle while they’re on the clock; they hang up and go to the next guy.

    

    Todd Boss

    12 Mar 25 at 9:10 am
16. good point Todd, I’ve read where Holliday is already getting paid or at least has a deal in place

    

    FredMD

    12 Mar 25 at 9:23 am
17. Todd, I think what SMS is getting at is why do teams do it this way and respect their competition’s completely arbitrary decisions? (And if this was SMS’s question, it’s mine) Why should the Nats respect the Mets draft strategy, just because the Mets made a calculated risk to underpay someone in the first round, so they could overpay someone in the 2nd round, and thus price out the Nats?

    Why voluntarily make your opposition better? Yes, I suppose it helps you, as you then have more certainty to play out your draft strategy. But what’s the downside? Is another team, miffed at the Nats taking a guy they’d “claimed” with a big overslot payment, really going to sabotage their own draft strategy and try and target guys the Nats had pre-arranged deals with just to get revenge? Plus, it wouldn’t work, because a “rogue” team like the Nats would presumably just move onto the next best guy on the board, and piss off another team without any real harm done.

    It’s definitely a high risk strategy, because you only get compensated for non-signed picks in the 1st round, and doubly punished because you lose that pooled money too from your overall draft purse if you don’t sign the player, which bites with the 5% overage, and potential slot savings.

    But I do wonder how likely some of these HSers are set on going to college, especially when you’re offering 1st-4th round bonuses. I just had a look at what Cam Johnson is up to (who I mentioned earlier, MLB rated him 30th in 2023, he didn’t sign due to too high bonus demands), and he had a terrible freshman year, got rocked in the Cape Cod league, and looks ffaaaarrr away from being drafted, much less in the 1st round. I think I’ll have a look at what the success rate of un-signed HSers from 2019 looks like, but surely their agents, I mean, advisors have done this research. But I think there’s probably some scope for a team to kind of tear up the unwritten rules and gain a pretty significant advantage in the draft this way.

    

    Will

    12 Mar 25 at 10:24 am
18. Just had a look at the 2019 draft class, and rather than the players who didn’t sign, looked at players from MLB’s top 100 prospects list and looked at those that were either unsigned or undrafted (as they went undrafted because their bonus demands priced them out:

    Maurice Hampton – rated 29th best in 2019 – went to LSU, had a dreadful career and was never drafted again – BUST
    Jack Leiter – rated 33rd – drafted 1-2 in 2021 – BOOM
    Hunter Barco – rated 34th – drafted 44th overall in 2022 and signed for $1.53m – NEUTRAL?
    Brooks Lee – rated 37th – got drafted 1-8 in 2022 – BOOM
    Bryce Osmond – rated 53rd – Nats took a flyer on him in the 35th round, then was drafted by the Angels in the 15th round – BUST
    Jerrion Ealey – 66th – never drafted again – BUST
    Spencer Jones – 71st – drafted 1-25 in 2022 – BOOM
    Will Rigney – 80th – never drafted again – BUST
    Riley Cornelio – rated 86th – Nats took him in the 7th round in 2022 with a $240k bonus – BUST
    Brett Thomas -93rd – never drafted again – BUST
    Chris Newell – 96th – drafted in the 13th round with a $147k bonus – BUST

    I realize this is an imperfect model, as it treats MLB Pipeline’s ratings as objectively correct, and doesn’t consider things like the non-monetary value of getting a college education, and the social experience, and all that.

    But I count 3 booms, 1 neutral as Barco didn’t really improve his position, and 7 busts. I wonder how this stacks up against other drafts historically. But it does make it a big risk to turn down $1m (3rd round money) in the hopes you can play your way into 1st round money. Because unsigned players in the first 10 rounds are basically nonexistent these days, seemingly because teams respect verbal commitments. I’m not sure I’d want the Nats to be the team to do it, but there’s serious potential value to be gained from tossing out the unwritten rules, calling HSers bluffs on their bonus demands, and just generally taking a more cavalier approach to drafting the best players on the board. A very high risk-high reward strategy.

    

    Will

    12 Mar 25 at 10:51 am
19. I dug a bit into overslot signs from the past few drafts. I only looked at folks with with a $1M+ bonus that was at least $500k overslot. I ignored the 2024 draft, since we don’t know much more about those folks than we did on draft day, and grabbed 57 names from across 2021, 2022 and 2023.

    Five of them were 1st round picks, which feels like a different beast. Removing those, I then broke it out into groups and looked at the hit rate of being currently a top 100 prospect by Pipeline. (Echoing Will’s caveat – I know that’s not really an objective measure, but I didn’t want to go back to previous CBA’s just in order to have actual ML data on these guys.)

    Overall, it’s 11 of the 52 are in the top 100. (Well, 10 are, and one is James Wood, who has graduated. I’m counting him as a “hit”.) They have another 10 as FV50 (eg House, King and Clemmey on our current top 30).

    If you narrow to bonuses of $2M+, it’s 9 of 21 in the top 100 (counting Wood) and 4 more FV50s. That’s pretty good if you ask me, and does feel like the hit rate you’d expect in the middle or the back half of the first round.

    (Also, @Will – yes – that is exactly the point that I’ve been trying to understand. Why does it seem like teams refrain from optimally exploiting these dynamics? I think that unsigned picks from the first 3 rounds are returned the next year, not just the first round. Which makes the downside risk even less clear to me. Yes, it’s a PR hit and a year of lost development, but in a below average draft year, I’d be fine with a little risk. Especially if the team was smart about it and had backup plans for the extra pool money should a pick fall through.)

    

    SMS

    12 Mar 25 at 11:29 am
20. I wonder since instituting the hard draft pool cap/compensation picks, if a club tried this approach and it failed, hence why no one attempts it anymore?

    It should be easy enough to find. Trawl through the past decade of drafts and find a team that failed to sign multiple top 5 picks.

    It’s definitely not happened recently though. IIRC, Todd has been keeping a tally on unsigned players, and there’s almost none (<10 per draft) anymore.

    

    Will

    12 Mar 25 at 11:43 am
21. @Will: I’m not sure all teams respect these deals. I think that’s why we periodically get a crazy non-signing in like the 2nd round, when a player has a deal for X dollars and some team grabs him beforehand and won’t go anywhere near X. It used to happen a ton more, but now with draft slots and the loss of that money … teams are anathema to do it anymore. And when Houston blew the Aiken pick AND it cost another kid his signing b/c he had a deal in place, MLB didn’t want that dirty laundry aired and the Astros paid off the player (Jacob Nix) in a deal never disclosed.

    But the stakes are just too high if you blow a pick in the top 10 rounds now.

    

    Todd Boss

    12 Mar 25 at 3:12 pm
22. FWIW, I know that one mid-tier SEC baseball program was trying to raise $5 million for its NIL pool. Presumably that’s their whole amount for the season. With basketball and particularly football competing for big chunks of the collective money, I can’t imagine that the baseball piece of the NIL pie is going to be huge. I would say that they’re likely not going to be able to sway guys with high first-round grades, although William Schmidt was ranked #16 on the MLB.com board last year but signed with LSU, supposedly due somewhat to NIL money. He was also a local Baton Rouge kid, so there was probably more at work than met the eye. He might also have been falling more than expected, with Yesavage not going until #20 and high school pitchers not until #s 24 and 25.

    Whatever LSU paid, Schmidt is off to a 3-0 start with a 1.35 ERA and 0.92 WHIP. If part of the equation was “betting on himself,” if he’s a top-5 pick in 2027, he’ll recoup more than what he turned down . . . if his arm stays healthy. Man, it would really be difficult to tell a high school pitcher to pass on high first-round money, though, with so much chance of injury.

    On another note, I want to echo what Will said about not really buying in on the Nats going for huge slot savings with the 1/1 pick. That strategy might have made more sense for PIT/CLE/BALTO and you had a competitive balance pick (I HATE those!) in the 30s, but as Will documents, way down at #49, the pickings are going to be slimmer.

    I don’t see any huge overslots in recent years at picks #49 or 48, but at #47, there have been three overslots in the last five drafts, and five of the last seven, so it isn’t unheard of at that level. (One of the non-overslots at #47 was Lile. Cayden Wallace was a #49 pick, for quality frame of reference.) I see one overslot at #50, in 2023, one at #51 in 2024. As Will noted, these are all high schoolers. The overslot amount in most of these cases is around a million, up to $1.5M at the most.

    

    KW

    12 Mar 25 at 7:53 pm
23. @KW – I’m not sure I see the cause for skepticism around top talents falling to our picks.

    I’m seeing James Triantos (#56 in 2021), James Wood (#62 in 2021), Jacob Misiorowski (#63 in 2022), Travis Sykora (#71 in 2023), Bubba Chandler (#72 in 2021) and Roman Anthony (#79 in 2022). I’m also seeing Cooper Pratt (#182 in 2023) and Caden Dana (#328 in 2022), but those late round picks are rarer and may be idiosyncratic.

    And if you just look at Nat’s picks over these three drafts, the $1M+ bonuses went to House, Lile, Green, Bennett, Cox, Crews, Morales and Sykora. Of that list, Sykora is clearly the second most valuable at this point – more valuable than 2 of the 3 1st round picks and all 3 2nd round picks – and he’s the only one drafted significantly overslot (>$500k). I see Rizzo as basically 1 for 1 on overslot picks in this range of the draft (rounds 2 and 3).

    I guess the jury is still out on Dickerson as attempt #2.

    

    SMS

    13 Mar 25 at 5:26 am
24. I’m not saying don’t save some money on the 1/1 pick if you can. It certainly makes sense to try, particularly in a draft where the guys at the top of it are generally not thought to be the quality of recent years. At the same time, though, spend enough to get the guy you really want. Don’t get so obsessed with playing two or three guys against each other that you don’t spend that extra $500k to get the one you really want. If you think Doyle is better than Arnold, then get the guy you think is better.

    Yes, there are plenty of examples of guys taken later in the draft who were success stories, but they’re also cherry-picked. The reality is that 90 to 95 percent of the guys taken after the first 30 picks or so don’t make it. For every James Wood there’s a busload of Sammy Infantes. They’re total lottery tickets.

    The other reality is that it’s a long and bumpy road with most high school picks, even ones taken at the top of the draft, and especially with ones taken later. And that’s who we’re talking about saving money for — high school kids. Most collegiates taken have little bargaining power, as most will be picked later and offered less as seniors.

    

    KW

    13 Mar 25 at 6:22 am
25. I mean, my names aren’t that cherry picked.

    For those three drafts, I looked at all picks after the 1st round that were at least $500k over slot, and if you add in the filter that the bonus is at least $2M+, the hit rate is great(**). 9 of 21. Sure, some of those picks were in the comp round, but if you want to only look after the 45th pick, the hit rate is even better. 7 of 13. (I’m not claiming that it’s better not to have the comp pick, and I think that’s just noise, but I’m not seeing any evidence whatsoever that these kind of talents can’t be floated back to our picks.)

    I do agree with your point that, if you see a significant differential among the potential guys at 1-1, that’s the most important thing. Don’t outsmart yourself if your scouts see a big difference. But if it’s pretty close and both guys are FV55s, and you like one just a hair better than the other, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with prioritizing the $500k in savings if it empowers you draft Sykora instead of Lipscomb in the third.

    ** I admit I’m using a subjective “Currently in Pipeline’s Top 100 or is James Wood” as the marker of success, but that’s just so I can evaluate recent draft classes that occurred under similar market conditions to what we can expect this summer. I also think the $500k+ overslot and the $2M+ bonus thresholds are extremely reasonable benchmarks for what we’d expect to see if 1-1 comes in at $8.5M or something. YMMV about those boundary conditions.

    

    SMS

    13 Mar 25 at 6:50 am
26. One more clarification — I definitely agree with you that virtually all draft picks fail. And your estimate of 90% or 95% after the first round sounds perfectly reasonable to me. I’m also clear that “making Pipeline’s top 100” isn’t the same thing as “being a productive major leaguer”, so I know that I’m using a generous bar to measure success. I expect probably half of my “hits” to actually be “misses” by the measures we actually care about.

    My point is just that these picks that get 1st round bonus money after the first round seem to perform more like 1st rounders than 2nd and 3rd rounders. Which is to say that I don’t agree that our selection set is going to be especially picked over. Of course, for any given kid that the team is targeting, other large pool teams could outbid us, and if they have a comp pick that gives them first mover privileges, we’ll be at a strategic disadvantage. But I don’t see any reason that our situation would be atypical in that regard, so generalizing from that dataset feels reasonable to me.

    

    SMS

    13 Mar 25 at 7:02 am
27. Yeah, the high school element to me is quite worrying. We’ve witnessed first hand how the new minor league set up is actively detrimental to HS and IFA players’ development. It’s not a guarantee of failure, Sykora is living and breathing proof of this, but with the contraction of short season ball, I think the task for HS picks has gotten much taller, especially for a franchise like the Nationals that struggles teaching and developing hitters. Though I wonder what kind of effect this has on HS pick signability concerns. Does this make them more or less likely to sign? Take the 7 figure bonus today because the odds of making the majors are always quite slim for a HS pick, or eschew the bonus and risk it, by taking the potentially more optimal development path (weirdly enough: college)?

    FanGraphs did a study on the value of draft picks a few years ago: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/an-update-on-how-to-value-draft-picks/

    They found the value of 1-1 to be worth $45.5m, 1-2: $41.6m, by 1-10 it’s down to half that at $23.3m, by 1-25, it’s half of that at $12m. By 49 (our 2nd rounder), it a further half of that, at $6.1m. And by pick 70 (where they stop), it’s almost half of that at $3.8m. All that to say, value drops precipitously in the draft. 1-1 is 6.5 times more valuable than 2-1.

    There is a good chance that the Nats could snag a guy who’s talent-wise something like the 25-30th best by our 49th pick, but the difference between the 25th pick value ($12.0m) and the 49th is ($6.1m) is less than $6m, whereas the difference between 1-1 and 1-3, alone, is $7m. The real value comes from nailing your 1-1 pick, as the value there will dwarf every other pick’s value combined.

    With that said, more often than not, there’s a clear hierarchy of talent in any given draft year, where Strasburg or Harper are head and shoulders better than the rest, or even where there’s a consensus top few, like Skenes, Crews and Langford. This year is looking like we could have ten different prospect watchers claim ten different players are the best prospect. And if the Nats internally don’t see any real difference between them, taking the cheapest guy could be the best strategy.

    

    Will

    13 Mar 25 at 7:13 am
28. That FG study is really informative, but I wished they’d do a parallel one sorting by bonus amounts instead of the ordinal pick number. Sammy Infante (#71) got $1M which would have been slot for #66. James Wood (#62) got $2.6M which would have been slot for #26. It’s just not the same thing.

    I do hear your point about our dev team struggling to help young hitters. House isn’t quite a failure, but he isn’t a success yet either. Add in Vaquero and maybe a couple of other IFA signings and it’s been a few years with several failures and no real successes in terms of highly touted teenage bats. Maybe that means being more inclined to get a college bat at 1-1, and then grab a couple of overslot high school arms in the 2nd and 3rd rounds.

    

    SMS

    13 Mar 25 at 7:51 am
29. @SMS, it starts to get halfway to what you’re describing. FG also published a study that compares FV scouting reports with performance outcomes: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/how-do-prospect-grades-translate-to-future-outcomes/

    It uses FG’s scouting reports rather than MLB Pipeline’s, but if you could convert the nominal draft ratings to FVs, you could start clustering and calculating value. But then again, James Wood was picked 62nd, he was rated by FG to be the 70th best prospect in 2021, MLB had him as the 44th best prospect, and he was paid like the 26th best. So who knows which method is the best to use here? It would be a really interesting meta study of what proved to be the most effective predictor of future success: draft position, bonus payment, or a specific prospect guru’s ratings?

    

    Will

    13 Mar 25 at 9:53 am
30. I share Will’s general concern about developing high school picks, no matter when taken, in the contracted-minors environment. It’s very self-defeating what MLB has done to itself on that front.

    As for this specific draft and the Nats possibly saving slot money to throw at a high schooler at pick 49, one significant rub is that 14 other teams will have a second pick — and four teams with a third pick — before the Nats pick again. The 1/2 Angels pick at 47, the 1/3 Mariners at 35, the 1/4 Rockies at 45, and the 1/7 Marlins at 43 and 46. It’s always the Wild West with pre-draft deals, but it may be particularly crazy this year with all the teams looking for slot savings with early picks.

    If insane bidding breaks out for certain high schoolers, the best players available at pick 49 may in fact be falling collegians.

    

    KW

    13 Mar 25 at 7:50 pm
31. Maybe, but I think only Seattle will have a meaningfully bigger pool, and even that will be by less than $1M. The Angels look like they’ll have a bigger pool too, but by like $50k. And Rockies and Marlins will have about a $1M less than the Nats.

    Plus, if the consensus is that there are a few equivalent picks at 1-1, the Nats will have first choice to get the cheapest one. So it’s not obvious that the Angels or the Mariners will be able to go as far underslot as we are unless they’re willing to more aggressively tank the pick (which I don’t think we should expect of any of the top 5 pick, though maybe the Marlins could do something aggressive).

    I mean, I hear you on the draft order complicating the issue. And I won’t be stunned if Seattle or someone ends up outbidding us for our favorite overslot pick. But each team has slightly different preferences, and I think it’s more probable that the Nats will be able to land their favorite of the late first round HSers with #49. Once we get to #81, maybe this set is more picked over, but even that doesn’t feel like a foregone conclusion. Roman Anthony got to #79, and I don’t think any of the next several teams would have been in a position to grab him.

    

    SMS

    14 Mar 25 at 1:21 pm
32. to Todd’s point, Doyle looked a little more mortal vs Florida last night.

    

    FredMD

    15 Mar 25 at 9:13 am
33. SMS, it’s not the pool money, it’s that the other teams will have a second pick, and sometimes a third pick, before the Nats do. Most of the overslot-worthy high schoolers will have already gotten their overslot money before the Nats pick again. Even if the Nats were to try to make a deal with a certain guy, and promise him a lot, there isn’t going to be a guarantee that he’ll fall to them.

    Doyle only surrendered three hits and one earned run (on a homer) against FLA last night, but the more concerning thing is that he labored through 105 pitches in only 4.2 IP. He struck out six, walked two, and hit a batter.

    

    KW

    15 Mar 25 at 10:52 am
34. In a blowout win over Boston College today, Arnold pitched for the first time since 2/28. In 4.2 IP he surrendered just one hit (a double) and two walks, struck out eight, on 79 pitches. Like Doyle he also hit a batter. FWIW, Doyle was pitching against a significantly better team, as often will be the case in the SEC.

    

    KW

    15 Mar 25 at 5:00 pm
35. Doyle and Arnold: I’ll probably go an other week before another check-in.

    Tomorrow i’ll post my personal Rankings for our farm system. The last time we’ll do such prospect discussions for het year (well, when Fangraphs finally publishes in June i’m sure i’ll pipe up).

    

    Todd Boss

    16 Mar 25 at 10:30 pm
36. @KW – Look, maybe you’re right. You certainly follow the draft and amateur baseball in far more detail than I do. And, like I’ve said, i don’t understand the forcing mechanism that protects these overslot deals.

    But I see two competing idealized models for how the draft operates – one in which the main boundary condition for allocating talent is the draft order itself and the other in which the main condition is the limited bonus pools. We’d probably both concede that the truth lies in between.

    You’re warning that almost any team can match our plausible overslot bonuses by just grabbing that player with their 1st pick and giving them full slot, and it’s even possible that the other big pool teams can even match our offers with later picks that are still before ours. I agree that’s possible, but that’s the way these overslot picks always work.

    What I don’t understand about your argument, is that I don’t see what makes the Nats situation this year at all different than that of any other team whose draft picks make up the dataset above. The Padres in 2021 got James Wood at pick 62 by offering him a late-first round bonus. Plenty of teams picked twice or thrice ahead of them that year, and the Reds had already picked 4 times. Same thing when the Nats picked Sykora – most every team had picked at least twice, several thrice, and 2 or 3 had picked 4 times.

    So please let me know if I’m missing something, but as near as I can tell the “pool money” model is more accurate than the “pick scarcity” model in terms of the value of these overslot picks.

    

    SMS

    17 Mar 25 at 8:49 am
37. @SMS. Everything I’ve read about the way the modern draft operates goes like this:

    Teams on the clock in the first several rounds call targeted picks and basically have a 30 second conversation: “Hi Joe, We’re picking next; if we offer you $950,000 will you sign?” And the player can say yes or no, without getting into any details about why they said yes or no. The player should have had a pre-draft conversation with an agent who could project for them where they’d likely get picked, what the slot bonus amount is there, and whether that would be enough to either forgo college scholarship or to forgo your last year of eligibility if you’re a college soph/jr. If you’re a top Prep kid with a full ride to LSU, your $$ amount is going to be mid 1st round money. If you’re more like a 3rd round projection ($1m or so) but you think you’re better than that, maybe your number is $1.5M.

    Ok. So lets say you’re Luke Dickerson, and the Nats love you. The Nats call you ahead of time and are like, “what will it take for you to sign with us’ and Dickerson gives them a huge number. $4m. Nats go, ok how about $3.8M? Dickerson says yes. So now the Nats have made a promise to draft him in the 3rd for $3.8M. So now every team that calls Dickerson before that will go, “hey we’re the Mets its 2nd round will you sign for $1.8M and he says, ‘nope!'” and they move on. There’s just so little incentive now for teams to miss on a top10 round draft pick that they can’t afford to screw around. And that’s why you almost never see top 10 picks go unsigned in this new era. If you don’t sign a player, you lose that entire chunk of bonus money, which in many cases is leveraged to other players. You shave $100k on your 6th, 7th, and 8th rounder to offer $300k more to your 11th rounder. etc.

    So, yes, in theory a team could just say screw it and draft Dickerson even though Dickerson says he won’t sign … but if you lose $1M of your signing pool, that’s death to your ability to move money around for other picks. Look what happened to Houston when they blew the Aiken pick; they were offering him under-slot and the savings enabled them to offer over-slot to a pick later on; when Aiken deal fell through, so did the other overslot deal … which caused a grievance and some serious questions to be asked.

    this process continues well into the 8th/9th/10th senior sign rounds, where teams call total randoms and go “will you sign for $1k and a plane ticket to Florida?” and guys who have no business signing are like, You bet! Because if they say no they’re not getting drafted and not likely even signing an NDFA deal and are done with baseball.

    

    Todd Boss

    17 Mar 25 at 9:21 am
38. @Todd + KW

    I’m not sure if anyone’s still checking this conversation, but I appreciate Todd writing that up and wanted to respond.

    Based on Todd’s description it seems like the players are able to defend these deals and the time-boxed nature of the draft keeps negotiations short and perfunctory enough that there isn’t any information leakage that would let other teams interfere.

    One downstream effect of that would be that the “bonus pool” model would be more accurate than the “draft order” model, at least among a certain class of FV45s high schoolers. And that was borne out empirically when I looked through those recent drafts.

    

    SMS

    18 Mar 25 at 7:01 am

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