2025 Draft is in the Books!

 

We forgot to take a photo of the draft video chat, so this photo of the Smyth crew at Ruth's 4th birthday will have to do for now. We bowled, we ate cupcakes, there were meltdowns when the arcade cards ran out of credits. It was the whole experience.

That's a wrap on preseason 2025. A full two hours later (one and a half hours if you were Dean or Paul) and the draft was complete. So who won? Well, let's frame things first.

Coming into the draft we knew some people had an advantage from selling players last year or having good keepers, but just how big of an advantage was it? 

I put together dollar values with a hypothetical $300 budget (for 30 players drafted) per team and, based on the player's statistical projection, I could rank them for when they should/could be drafted. For example projected #1 pick, Shohei Ohtani was worth $43, while 100th projected pick, Justin Steele, was worth $10.19, and the 300th player ranked, Ryan Jeffers, was worth $0.22. You get the idea. So I slotted these dollar values for pick values, and entered all the picks for each team. THEN, I looked at the keepers, attached that players statistical value with what pick they'd be kept in (bonus value), and we can see how much fake money each team was playing with to start the day. Let's roll.

The disparity for the head start that Dean and Paul have becomes even more clear. I felt this in the draft. When trading picks away last year, it felt like I was walking the line of selling out for a championship while keeping myself viable for the following year. This chart tells a different story: Arthur, Michael, and Max are significantly handcuffed to start the year. 

Also, props to Dean, Paul, and Cory for securing top end keepers all while not making the playoffs last year. That's not a common occurrence.

Ok dollars are fun, but we play for home runs and strikeouts, so what do those show? In the Yahoo Draft Standings Page, they count all the players you draft. For pitching, that's fine. You can start 3 to 6 relief pitchers every day, accumulating basically all of their stats, and rotate your starting pitchers in and out when they pitch and get all of their stats. But hitting? Active roster spots are limited. Last year, we accumulated 60,605 at bats, so I use that as a target for how many bats to count from the league, and therefore each person's lineup. This year, counting everyone's drafted starting lineup plus their first bench bat leads to a total of 63,587 projected ABs. Close Enough. So if you drafted 3, 4, 5 bench bats: lottery tickets are cool (for example, Jackson Merrill was Dave's second bench bat last year). but chances are you'll end up with more home runs on your bench and innings pitched, strikeouts, and quality starts not being earned, than if you had drafted more starting pitchers to help your team. So, with fangraphs projections in hand, and drafted rosters by team, here were the projected standings coming out of the draft:

Using Rotisserie Scoring (first in category is 10 points, etc), 

Lock Dean and Paul in for a September showdown? Not so fast my friend.

They're projected to lead, so what? We had a feeling that would happen. BUT WAIT. Let's compare apples to apples. Using the dollar values on hand, we can know how the value of each team drafted, and then we can know how many fake dollars were spent at the table to down scale the starting draft day value to see how effective each team was. By the method I used, we spent $2500 on players this draft (more on why so far below $3000 in a minute), so then how did each team fare:

Let's go back to the silly dollar values again:

What you see here is that Dean, Paul, Cory, Kevin, and Michael all found players at values better than the draft slot would have expected they'd be able to get, more often than not. Michael may seem like a huge benefactor here but that's just the result of him drafting using these values and there being a lot of late round values. 

OK so who were the best and worst picks by value, using this math. Let's start with the good (not counting keepers:

You can see a mix here. The math liked late relief pitchers and catchers. We'll see if that pans out or not.  But that Cal Raleigh pick, chef's kiss. 

And the ...let's say head scratching:

These are a mix of injury risks (Mike Trout, projected for fewer PAs and counting stats than his draft spot lends itself to be worth), lottery tickets (come on down, Will Warren), and...that guy still plays baseball (Trevor Story)? These numbers so far below $0 are why we didn't spend $3000 at the draft. The negative values always need some context. 

Dean drafted a number of negative value picks like Acuna ($26 slot value, $22 player value), Strider ($13 slot value, $6 player value), DeGrom (keeper), etc. These were high end, high risk, injury-prone or already-injured guys. Dean's opinion was that with his huge head start, he can cruise for a month plus while names like Acuna and Strider come back and he has excess value to hope DeGrom is DeGrom. In the meantime, he can pick up replacement level players to supplement somewhat depressed projected-value and his real-value drafted team is likely significantly higher than what the numbers show...but I'd add that this comes with significantly more risk of the bottom falling out than I would have expected him to take on. 

For the Max number I had to look for myself. Max didn't take a starting pitcher until Round 15. Last year, Max never had starting pitching volume to keep up with most teams' outputs, so he led in save-holds most of the year and relied on a high end offense. He appears to be trying this again....but he doesn't appear to have that level of offense from the jump...though is projected to lead in Stolen Bases and Save-Holds. Yay. It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for him.

The beauty of the draft is none of this stuff matters by Tuesday. Strap in for another fun year.