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 →
