Intro to the Original Draft Series

With the draft recently completed, it got me thinking. Teams are going to spend quite a bit of money in terms of bonuses and development costs to get these players to the Major leagues. But nearly all of the players drafted this year will not make it to the Majors, and an even smaller percentage will make it with the team who drafted or signed them initially. So I wondered if certain teams were better at determining which players had a better shot at making it to the bigs.

The Criteria:

For players who were drafted, I placed them with the organization that was able to sign them.
Example: Luke Hochevar was drafted by the Dodgers, but did not sign. He then went back into the draft and was drafted by the Royals. He signed with the Royals, so he is on thr list for the Royals.

For international free agents, I placed the players with the first team to sign them.
Examples: Jose Reyes was signed out of the Dominican Republic by the Mets, so he is listed on the Mets. Hideki Matsui signed his first contract in the US with the Yankees, so he is on their list.

I started by looking at all the players on the 25 man rosters. I did this over the span of a few weeks ( as you might imagine, it takes awhile) and have been doing updates as players are called up. When I ran out of players who were on 25 man rosters, I started looking at the 40 man rosters for players who have played at least 1 game in the Majors.

The hardest part was honestly filling some of these teams, as they have really failed to develop a lot of players, especially at specific positions. I tried to plug in the lineups and pitching staff in a similar manner to how the real teams do it. Unfortunately, some teams have not developed enough players at certain positions to make that work. At the end, I will review again some of my findings.

These posts will be in my order of rank from worst to best. I will be starting with team #30 with a post on Tuesday, after Monday’s Week in Review post.