Sports Rando

Kansas City Royals fans have had a love/hate relationship with the Dayton Moore regime. On the one hand, KCR went to two World Series and won one on his watch. On the other hand, his drafts have been pretty horrible and the team has played relatively miserably the other 9 years. (And oh by the way, clearly the players don’t feel accountable to the team or people and their health in general.) I wanted to see from a draft perspective how bad they have been.

To this end, pulled 1st round draft data (technically the 1st 30 picks) from Baseball Reference from 2007 (the first draft DM takes credit for) through 2018 (giving teams/players credit for being in the system for up to 3 years). From there, I grouped picks into sets of 5 (picks 1-5, 6-10 etc.) and got it to an average per year. The WAR per year differences are interesting in and of themselves — a player picked 1-5 should average 1.38 WAR/yr; a player picked 26-30 will average 0.14 WAR/yr. Basically top of the draft is pretty much a lock to be serviceable, and bottom of the first round — not so much.

Long story short, when looking at players KCR have drafted in total, they are last in the MLB in observed vs expected WAR, with -49.1 less than what they should have, based on when (what year) and where (what pick) they drafted their players.

At the top of the food chain are the Angels (73.4, mainly driven by Trout), Nationals (58.1, Harper/Rendon/Strasburg), Astros (55.2, Correa/Springer/Bregman) and Giants (52.8, Posey/Bumgarner/Z. Wheeler).

KCR is actually hit harder with hitters than pitchers, at a -37.9 for hitters.

Obviously they hit decently on Hosmer and Moustakas, but not well enough to cover for Colon, Starling and Dozier (which is interesting and I’m a big Dozier guy (well I was until a week ago) but he still has a negative WAR and was drafted in 2013). The fact that 4 of them were top 5 picks doesn’t help either — Moustakas and Hosmer come in at about expected, and the other 3 are well below.

The Pirates and Rays are below them — but jump them in overall because of moderate (Pirates) to solid (Rays) success with pitching…which as you would expect, KCR is still in the negative territory.

That said, by virtue of where they were drafted (late 10’s) and the moderate success they had, Crow, Finnegan and Singer buoy the -8+ Zimmer contributes (the others who qualify, Griffin and Ashe Russell, were drafted low enough that their expected wasn’t that much anyway).

It is hard to glean too terribly much from it given the counts per team are so low…other than they have really missed on some big picks and haven’t hit big on anyone (Hosmer ranks 76th, which is the 2nd lowest top performer of any team). This is just one way of looking at it — at least the Royals have sort of hit on a couple of players — the Rangers (with much less top-of-the-round picks) haven’t really hit on anyone (196 HR and a .229 BA in 1200+ games is your kind of guy (Justin Smoak)).

Kansas City Royals fans have had a love/hate relationship with the Dayton Moore regime. On the one hand, KCR went to two World Series and won one on his watch. On the other hand, his drafts have been pretty horrible and the team has played relatively miserably the other 9 years. (And oh by the way, clearly the players don’t feel accountable to the team or people and their health in general.) I wanted to see from a draft perspective how bad they have been.

To this end, pulled 1st round draft data (technically the 1st 30 picks) from Baseball Reference from 2007 (the first draft DM takes credit for) through 2018 (giving teams/players credit for being in the system for up to 3 years). From there, I grouped picks into sets of 5 (picks 1-5, 6-10 etc.) and got it to an average per year. The WAR per year differences are interesting in and of themselves — a player picked 1-5 should average 1.38 WAR/yr; a player picked 26-30 will average 0.14 WAR/yr. Basically top of the draft is pretty much a lock to be serviceable, and bottom of the first round — not so much.

Long story short, when looking at players KCR have drafted in total, they are last in the MLB in observed vs expected WAR, with -49.1 less than what they should have, based on when (what year) and where (what pick) they drafted their players.

At the top of the food chain are the Angels (73.4, mainly driven by Trout), Nationals (58.1, Harper/Rendon/Strasburg), Astros (55.2, Correa/Springer/Bregman) and Giants (52.8, Posey/Bumgarner/Z. Wheeler).

KCR is actually hit harder with hitters than pitchers, at a -37.9 for hitters.

Obviously they hit decently on Hosmer and Moustakas, but not well enough to cover for Colon, Starling and Dozier (which is interesting and I’m a big Dozier guy (well I was until a week ago) but he still has a negative WAR and was drafted in 2013). The fact that 4 of them were top 5 picks doesn’t help either — Moustakas and Hosmer come in at about expected, and the other 3 are well below.

The Pirates and Rays are below them — but jump them in overall because of moderate (Pirates) to solid (Rays) success with pitching…which as you would expect, KCR is still in the negative territory.

That said, by virtue of where they were drafted (late 10’s) and the moderate success they had, Crow, Finnegan and Singer buoy the -8+ Zimmer contributes (the others who qualify, Griffin and Ashe Russell, were drafted low enough that their expected wasn’t that much anyway).

It is hard to glean too terribly much from it given the counts per team are so low…other than they have really missed on some big picks and haven’t hit big on anyone (Hosmer ranks 76th, which is the 2nd lowest top performer of any team). This is just one way of looking at it — at least the Royals have sort of hit on a couple of players — the Rangers (with much less top-of-the-round picks) haven’t really hit on anyone (196 HR and a .229 BA in 1200+ games is your kind of guy (Justin Smoak)).