[Sweed]

Originally Posted by ChrisG

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.


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!

Good information. OOTP 27 is in a much better place in regard to the draft after the latest patch.