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Originally Posted by Sweed
Yes. Many times while playing out a game I'll look at opposing players with good to great ratings and find they were drafted in the later rounds. I'm not saying there are tons but the screen I'm attaching shows 6 players at 50+ in my league that were drafted round 15 or later.
Are they Brady or Pujols? If I went into the history of my league and searched long enough I'd probably find one or two. But to make it quick I'm just going to check my current season's MLB players. The closest in that screen is the 60/60 SP that in MLB terms is a star. I'd say "Brady or Pujols" would be a big ask as they are generational. Perhaps just having normal everyday players with some stars mixed in would be a better test?
It's not hard to check your current league and find out what you have. List all MLB players. Use/make a view that shows what round they were selected in along with their current OV/Pot and include any stats ratings you'd like in that view. I'll attach a screen on one specific SP that was taken in the 19th round of a 20 round draft(what I use now, used to be 25 rounds) . I'll also attach my MLB player list sorted with the lowest rounds selected first in my "how acquired" view. Red arrows on the player's card are the summer he was drafted. He's also marked in the MLB player screen with an arrow. Note he's not the only 50+ player on that screen, and there are more if I scroll down.
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100%! And the simple fact is that it is exceedingly rare in this era for a generational player to come from outside of the top rounds.
People forget that.
If you look at the top 40 active players by bWAR who came from the draft,
bold is anyone beyond round 3. First rounders (incl supplemental) have asterisks.
Quote:
1. Mike Trout*
2. Justin Verlander*
3. Mookie Betts (round 5)
4. Max Scherzer*
5. Freddie Freeman
6. Aaron Judge*
7. Paul Goldschmidt (round 8)
8. Manny Machado*
9. Chris Sale*
10. Nolan Arenado
11. Francisco Lindor*
12. Bryce Harper*
13. Marcus Semien (round 6)
14. Andrew McCutchen*
15. Jacob deGrom (round 9)
16. Carlos Correa*
17. Giancarlo Stanton
18. Christian Yelich*
19. Corey Seager*
20. Alex Bregman*
21. Gerrit Cole*
22. Matt Chapman*
23. Matt Olson*
24. George Springer*
25. Trea Turner*
26. Zack Wheeler*
27. J.T. Realmuto
28. Aaron Nola*
29. Trevor Story*
30. Anthony Rendon*
31. Sonny Gray*
32. Cody Bellinger (Round 4)
33. Byron Buxton*
34. Max Fried*
35. Dansby Swanson*
36. Kevin Gausman*
37. Max Muncy (Round 5)
38. Kyle Tucker*
39. Kris Bryant*
40. Brandon Nimmo*
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If I did this right, only 6 of the 40 came from Round 4 or later, only 3 of whom were drafted in Round 6 or later.
Not a single player in this was picked beyond Round 10.
A full 30 out of 40 (75%) came out of the first round alone.
Point is: Generational talent almost exclusively comes out of the top 5 rounds and disproportionately from the 1st.
And anyone who doubts that that's the view in baseball: Look at how many people talk about how astoundingly low Aaron Judge and Mike Trout were drafted -- yet still in the first round.
Just to use a different metric, using fWAR this time bc their list is easier to parse - but broadly the same idea, here is the list of the top 100 WAR players overall in baseball (for simplicity, that includes international) picked from rounds 5-20:
34. Hunter Brown (Round 5)
53. Jarren Duran (Round 7)
60. Nathan Eovaldi (Round 11)
66. Bryan Woo (Round 6)
77. Mookie Betts (Round 5)
93. Zach McKinstry (Round 33)
94. Steven Kwan (Round 5)
Unless I missed one or two, that's it! And without digging too deep, if you very roughly assume that US/CAN/PR make up about three-quarters of that list, that's still only 7 out of 75 (9.3%), with 2 out of 75 (2.6%) coming from a double-digit round.
Scouts are actually really good at identifying future talent!