The Draft Man Cometh Part 1

The Draft.
My heart enters into that elevated and erratic pitter patter that would put less fit people in the hospital. My too-close-together eyes dilate as if thrown into blinding sunlight from a dark lair. My blood boils into my wang like that Typhoon that wiped Japan off the map a year ago.
The Draft.
The hours spent preparing, the petaflops spent calculating, the photons generated deep inside Sol travelling through the vacuum of space to hit printed words in Fantasy Baseball magazines and then be deposited into my rods or cones. All wasted when Lenny Dykstra picks Miguel Cabrera 4th and my entire strategy is thrown into disarray.
The Draft.
120 seconds stretches out to infinity as all sounds die away and my world distills down to myself, my computer screen, and a long list of players. Hunter Pence? Brandon Phillips? I could get a top-line starter here. If I don't take a second baseman now, I will have to get someone at the bottom of the barrel. Ichiro will get hits and steals, but without the Ding-a-lings, how can I make up RBIs and OPS? Bill James predicts a big year from Joseph Bats, but that hack comedy writer Matthew Berry doesn't buy in; who to trust! I love numbers but yet Berry has a podcast! What does that mean! What does any of it mean! The timer begins to beep and what had been an eternity is now but 4 seconds. Ichiro? Phillips? Bats? Rios? Help me Jebus! "Jayson Werth!" I hear a disembodied voice call out. And just like that, my fantasy season is destroyed.
The Draft.

But wait a minute here, what does the draft really mean? The year that my beloved Ackbars strode easily to victory, my first pick was solid, but my next 4 were pretty much garbagio. Other than Woo Woo, we pretty much all make our hay on the free agent wire; the drafted players do yeoman work, but they are rarely the decisive factor. Is the draft pointless? Does draft position have anything to do with how strong a player will be after all accounts have been closed? Unclear. Let's take a look at some hard data and see if we can draw any conclusions.
I looked back at the drafts from the past 3 years and then pulled out the ESPN power rankings of the top 500 players for these years as they stood at the end of the year. If a player finished outside of the top 500 for that year, he got a power ranking of 500. All keepers have been excluded in this analysis. Before you look below, think about what you would expect: The guys at the beginning of the draft would be the highest rated at the end of the year, so you would expect pretty much a linear pattern with the power rankings going up as the draft picks do. Is this what we get? Of course it isn't!

Much to my surprise, there are picks all over the place all the time. Early in the draft, there are picks that end up being total duds. Later in the draft, there are picks who end up being studly leaders who hoist their teams on their back and make their owners consider homosexuality or, in Justine's case, heterosexuality. I figured that the data is noisy, sure, but perhaps there were trends lurking that I would need the computer to tease out for me. But no! That is not the case! You can see that the linear regression, such as it is, fits the data insanely poorly yielding an R-squared of but 0.13. To the un-stat-savvy, or as my wife likes to call them, "normal people," this means more or less that there is only a 13% chance that there is any trend in this data!
"Well," you say casting a critical eye to my graph, "that is because the late rounds skew the data too much. If you look early, there will be a much stronger regression. True?

No! Untrue! There is even less of a trend in the early rounds than in the late (Again, looking at R-squared shows only a 2% chance that there is any trend in this data! 2% There is more cream in milk than that! Well, only in half and half. It is the exact same amount as is in 2%. But even that is too rich for me!)! I think that the only thing that you can say is that the first 20 guys picked will be pretty good, but really, will sort of be a similar mish-mash of strong players. While there is a good chance that you will get a buy who will carry your team in those first rounds, there is also an equally good chance that you will get a guy who is just OK, or even worse, totally stinks up the joint!
How can this be! How can the draft mean so little in the final reckoning? There are several notable cases that bear looking at:
-The top player at the end of the season has only come from the top 20 picks in the draft twice (Albert Pujols picked number 2 in 2009 and Matt Kemp picked number 15 last year). The other top player was Carlos Gonzalez in 2010 picked all the way in the 11th round at pick 109.
-The 5th highest rated player has never come from a round higher than the 4th, with the highest being Joseph Batthews picked #35 in 2011, Josh Hamilton picked #44 in 2010, and Joe Mauer picked #81 in 2009.
-The average number pick for the top-10 in the final power ranking was #26, as in you would be more likely to find a top-10 guy in the 3rd round or above than in the first round (*nb - I have a more thorough analysis of this type of phenomenon coming up later, but rest assured, this statement is not a wild misinterpretation of the data).
-3 players picked in the top 5 picks have finished ranked #100 or below: Hanley Ramirez picked 2nd in 2011 finished a disastrous #258, Jose Reyes picked 4th in 2009 finished a basically-didn't-matter 456th, and Chase Utley picked #5 in 2010 finished #110. How are those Marlins of Miami's chances looking now, boyee?
-The safest player in the last 3 years: Albert Pujols. He has been picked #2, #2, and #1 and finished #1, #2, and #11 in 2009, 2010, and 2011, respectively. Miguel Cabrera, the first off the board in a lot of the literature I have been reading was picked #6, #8, and #4 and finished #9, #4, and #4. Two new situations, probably no new outcomes. Another new situation: Ryan Braun. He was picked #5, #4, and #5 and finished #3, #13, and #2 in the past. With these 50 games possibly being levied against him for whatevers, where will he go in the draft?
-Consistently overrated: Captain Crunch Sabathia. Picked #16, #19, and #24, he finished only #48, #56, and #61. With wins out of the scoring this year, I can't imagine CC being on any of my teams, which of course means that I will get nervous and take him waaaaay too early. Also overrated: Jimmy Rollins. Picked #9, #18, and #66, he finished #123, #369, and #78.