When It’s Time For a Change

As I’ve been running through my Brian Sabean retrospective I’ve been running into some interesting things during the data crunching.

While checking into Sabean’s draft record I made a chart of every win share a team has drafted and how many of those were actually earned with the drafting team during his time using retrosheet, the Lahman database and Dave Studeman’s win shares database

But if you think that it takes around five years to start evaluating a draft, I was only looking at draft between 1997 and 2002, or six years. That works to compare Sabean against his peers, but not so well to get ideas of how franchises are doing at holding on to homegrown talent.

So I took it back to 1992 and ran it to 2006 (Lahamn doesn’t have retrosheet IDs for player debuting in 2007, which messes up the numbers) to get up to a better look and ran the numbers again. Here’s the full list:

Pct. of Drafted Win Shares Kept

Team	WS	Kept	Pct 

TBA	496	380	77%

PIT	734	544	74%

PHI	1158	820	71%

MIN	1164	795	68%

MIL	740	466	63%

OAK	1665	1019	61%

HOU	1248	757	61%

CHA	740	446	60%

CIN	851	507	60%

ARI	536	311	58%

COL	1279	730	57%

WAS	1092	620	57%

ATL	868	470	54%

ANA	871	470	54%

TOR	1393	724	52%

BAL	663	340	51%

DET	995	500	50%

SLN	1322	640	48%

KCA	1213	563	46%

NYA	756	319	42%

LAN	599	251	42%

SFN	956	390	41%

CHN	710	289	41%

BOS	1098	441	40%

SDN	688	269	39%

FLO	712	272	38%

SEA	1159	435	38%

TEX	1151	411	36%

NYN	744	240	32%

CLE	934	267	29%

Best Teams

What surprised me was that the top of the list was full of small and mid-market teams (Oakland, Minnesota, Pittsburgh) and the bottom 11 contained both New York teams, Boston and Los Angeles.

Minnesota did it by getting the most out of Tori Hunter, Corey Koskie and Jacque Jones with players such as Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau and Michael Cuddyer looking to add more value this year. Of course Hunter and Jones will help offset some of that.

The A’s appearance at the top has a couple of significant points. The first is that next time I do this I should include amateur free agent signings, which saves them from the loss of Miguel Tejada. The other is that Billy Beane and company have absolutely owned the draft and gotthe most out of their investments. Not only did they draft more win shares than anyone else they were sixth in keeping that talent.

The highlight of their list may be that through 2006 they’d won the Giambi battle, 166 to 118 win shares.The bad part is that their list is also full of players who still have years to contribute to the other side of the list, such as Andre Ethier, Jeremy Bonderman and Mark Teahen with veterans such as Eric Byrnes and Tim Hudson still productive (I hear Barry Zito is still hanging around somewhere, as well). It’ll be interesting to see how this group progresses and maybe in 10 years the A’s don’t look quite so well in this stretch.

Worst Teams

The Indians appearance at the bottom of the list is a function of two things; The cutoff date of the list and the players they picked up just before it.

The Indians had a great draft in 1989, picking 13 players who would make it to the majors, including Jim Thome in the 13th round and Brian Giles in the 17th. But Thome would end up blocking the two players who have contributed the most win shares to other teams from Indians’ drafts since 1992, Seasn Casey (145 win shares) and Richie Sexson (129).

Not surprisingly, the draft pick who has contributed the mos to the team is C.C. Sabathia at 77 win shares.

For the Mets, the big market team lowest on the list, the sin hasn’t been losing great players but a slew of role players. The top-3 who have contributed the most to other teams are Preston Wilson (102), Terrance Long (71) and Jay Payton (65). The two biggest misses on the list are A.J. Burnett (60) and Scott Kazmir, who should be much higher after the next few years if they can stay healthy.

The Rangers list was surprising to me mainly because I forgot they had drafted Rich Aurilia (160), Carlos Pena(39) and Aaron Harang (37). Losing Mark Texiera last year isn’t going to help when we look at this list next year.

And there is one big reason the Mariners are at the bottom. He resides in New York.