Overoptimizing Drafts

As we head into the 2022 Draft, I have been thinking about draft trends and how different the hot new pitch archetype has changed over the past couple years. Nowadays, you can't scroll through baseball Twitter without someone talking about "sweep," but this was not always the case. A few years ago, pitching Twitter was fired up about guys throwing 4 seamers up in the zone, and having a 12-6 or gyro slider to go along with it. This was a very successful strategy, and still is. However, now that we know how good an east-west pitcher can be and how they can be developed effectively, there is less emphasis on drafting the vertically oriented guy. Passing over a guy with a ton of SSW on his sinker just because he doesn't have a carrying fastball is a bad idea, but the public did not have this data a few years ago and thus overreacted (slightly) on traits that could be measured easily and performed well.

My point in writing out this out is to say optimizing your draft for what is popular now does not guarantee future success. If you did nothing but draft pitchers with rising 4 seam shapes and vertical breaking balls, you would have done fairly well. However, if in the later rounds you were debating between a mediocre present stuff vertical oriented pitcher versus a slightly better present stuff east-west pitcher, and you take the vertical pitcher on the assumption that the prototype is more projectable, that probably was the wrong decision, given how good player development has gotten in developing horizontal stuff. Note that I am not suggesting we go back to the days of drafting guys with 88 MPH generic sinkers. These guys are not good.

The easy part is drafting someone and the hard part is maximizing their development. It is a fair point that if a team was not drafting vertically oriented pitchers, they were not also thinking about sweeping sliders or SSW on a sinker and generally did not know how to develop it. The main lesson is to draft the player, not the prototype. If you draft a player because he fits the in vogue prototype, not because you have faith in his tools or a development plan tailor made for him (and lets face it, most teams don't), you might get lucky and get a solid player, but eventually you will get adverse selected by teams pushing the envelope and drafting players based on what they think the game will be in a few years. It's hard to do this well, but the only way to have a robust drafting and developing strategy.