Baseball first conducted a draft of amateur players in 1965 and has done so each year ever since.  Annual drafts from 1965 through 2011 add up to 47 years of drafting to date, and thus there have been 47 number-one overall picks, from Rick Monday in 1965 to Gerrit Cole in 2011.  Baseball-Reference makes it easy to check the career Wins Above Replacement level (WAR) total for each of these 47 guys — those totals run from a high of 104.6 for Alex Rodriguez (the number one pick in 1993) to sub-zero totals for guys such as Shawn Abner (first pick of 1984) and Matt Anderson (first pick of 1997).  If you simply calculate the average career WAR produced by all 47 of these guys to date, you get a 17.0  career WAR for the average overall number-one pick.

A 17 WAR career guy is generally a guy who had a serious career as a starter in the majors, and some good years, but a guy who is unlikely to make even a “Hall of the Very Good”.  Hitters with exactly a 17.0 career WAR include Bill Melton and Steve Kemp.  Aaron Sele is an example of a 17.1 career WAR pitcher.

But you might justifiably argue that taking the average of all 47 number-one pick career WARs isn’t really a fair way to get a useful career average for number-one picks.   That’s because such an approach undervalues all the more recent picks whose major league careers are not over, and in the most recent cases have barely or not even begun.  Bryce Harper is still a teenager, but this averaging method treats his current zero career WAR to date as the equal of guys who played out their entire careers and produced zero WAR (such as Steve Chilcott, 1966).   Some of the most recent overall first picks may turn out to be busts, but surely not all of them will.  Treating them all as zeroes merely because they are still very young surely can’t be a correct method for this sort of calculation of average performance by a number one overall pick.  Also, number-one picks such as A-Rod and Chipper Jones are still adding to their career WAR totals, as are younger, more recent picks such as Justin Upton and David Price, and their potential future added WAR should be accounted for, too.

So as a more sensible test, let’s restrict our averaging to just the overall number-ones selected from 1965 through 1989.  That way we limit ourselves to only those players whose careers are fully complete (Chipper was drafted number one overall in 1990), while also giving us a sample of twenty-five selections, which is small but represents more than half the group.  What’s the average career WAR for guys who were selected number one overall if we only look at the years from 1965 through 1989?  Surprise — it’s 17.0 again!  Which reminds us that while yes, some of the recent number-one overall  picks will turn out to be great players, and many will add to their current totals (in some cases will add a large number of WAR over thier future careers), some will also turn out to be duds, and that the 17 WAR average that we get looking at all 47 guys is perhaps not as far off from a realistic average as we thought it might be.

After the jump, I take a WAR-oriented historical look at the number-one overall picks from the 1960s, and the top alternatives that were missed in those years.  And perhaps in future posts, perhaps I ‘ll carry the process further into later decades. Continue reading →

John’s post here Monday, discussing Roy Halladay’s chances of reaching 300 wins, had me thinking about Doc’s well-known ability to pitch deep into games, racking up a lot of innings pitched in the process.  Here’s one example.  Most games of at least 9 innings pitched, 2005-2011: Halladay 49, Cliff Lee 27, Sabathia 22, Chris Carpenter 20.

Perhaps having pitched so many innings affects Halladay’s chances to continue to pitch at a high level at the later stages of his career?  Of course, being able to pitch so many innings in a game has helped Halladay win so many games in the first place, as the deeper a starter goes into the game the more likely he is to get the decision.  But set that aside, as  I was focused not on the past benefits of his innings numbers but on the possible future effect of his high number of innings pitched.    With that in mind I wanted to check how many innings Doc had actually racked up, compared to his contemporaries.   But thinking about  that I realized  I should also, and perhaps even more importantly, check how many pitches he had thrown, as that seemed as if it might be more relevant than his innings pitched.  My findings are after the jump. Continue reading →

When Major League Baseball re-aligned into three divisions per league in 1994, the AL West and NL West were assigned only four teams each.  These two divisions thus became the smallest units of regular season competitive standings at the major league level of baseball since such leagues have existed.  The NL West enjoyed this cozy arrangement only until 1998, when a new baby arrived in the form of the Arizona expansion team.  The AL West, on the other hand, has remained undisturbed as a family of four for eighteen seasons.

2012 will, however, be the last year of splendid isolation for the Angels/Mariners/A’s/Rangers as the emigrating Astros arrive on the AL West’s shores beginning in 2013.  In addition, 2012 brings, to the AL West, the Player of the Century thus far (WAR 2000-2011: 1. Pujols 88.7, 2. A-Rod 78.5, 3. Bonds 64.4, 4. Halladay 58.9, 5. Beltran 56.2).  So it seems an opportune time to look back at some stats-based history of the four-team AL West, which you can read after the jump. Continue reading →

In my first post, earlier today, I pointed out that the Yankees led the majors in regular season wins over the five-year periods from 2007 through 2011, 2006 through 2010 and  2005 through 2009 — with exactly the same number of total wins over each of those five-year periods.   One can look at the full sequence of such five-year periods  through baseball history, and by doing so look at which team, at the end of each season, was at that moment the “Best Team of the Past Five Years”.

This method gives a look at which team was most consistently around the top of major league baseball during various eras. After the jump, you’ll see a full list, beginning with 2011 and going back to the beginning of the 20th Century, showing for each year the team that had the best overall record over the five then-most-recent regular seasons.  So, for example, when the list below shows the Yankees as the “Best Team of the Past Five Years” in every season from 2004 through 2011, that means the Yanks had the best five-season record overall during each of the following five-year periods: 2000 to 2004, 2001 to 2005, 2002 to 2006, 2003 to 2007, 2004 to 2008, 2005 to 2009, 2006 to 2010 and 2007 to 2011.

Continue reading →