Where to Find Aces

(Authors Note this was written back in 2013)


In April, I wrote a piece looking at the failure rate of high first-round picks, and what I found was that pitchers are much more likely to fail than hitters. It wasn’t even close as hitters were about 15% more successful than pitchers. This leads me to think a team might be wise to just go for hitters early rather than take the risk on pitchers. Well, this thought I realized was somewhat flawed, I was just looking at success rate and not really looking at where great pitching comes from. It might be a risk to draft them earlier, but what if that is also the only place to find genuinely great pitching.

This leads me to try and discover where does one find Aces? Is there a rhyme and reason, or is there no such thing as a pitching prospect. The best indicator statistic for pitchers right now is xFIP, its fielding independent pitching. It allows one to judge the pitcher alone and not take into account the defense around him. It also takes out the variance associated with homerun rates. The best part is it is on the same scale as the old ERA stat, so anyone can look at the numbers and understand them.

I decided to go back to 2007, and take the top ten pitchers in xFIP over the last seven years, so seventy total players. If a player made the list more than once, he counted each time. This gave me the right amount of data on where you can and can’t find Aces.

Where you don’t find aces?

Well, in general, there has been little luck with international free agents; they had only 13 appearances, which came out to about only about 19%. On top of that, almost half of those appearances were Felix Hernandez and Yu Darvish. I am not sure the reason, might be something with starting in systems at a much younger age, but International players just don’t seem to be the place to find your front line starter.

In the last six years, not a single top pitcher has been taken after the 8th round. If you go back to 2007, then you get two players who appear John Smoltz who was a 22nd round pick and Jake Peavy a 15th rounder. The total percentage of Aces found after round eight is 3%, which makes them outliers more than a prediction of the ability to find such pitchers. A guy like Doug Fister, who appeared once, while being unheralded, was still a 7th round selection, showing you need to grab arms early.

I ended up putting them together with the other college players, but in general, community college pitchers were also a rare occurrence. If you wanted to find a star pitcher, it won’t be in Juco and not really in college in general. Only 22 pitchers from any college made the list for a total of 31%. The safest pitcher is viewed as a college pitcher, and there have been many great early picks for college pitchers, but it is pretty clear the safe college pitcher, especially after the top ten picks, doesn’t have the Ace upside many teams would want in a high pick.

Where the Aces are

Fifty percent of Ace pitchers were high school picks. So if you combine this with my earlier piece, then high school pitchers are the most significant risks, but also the biggest reward. The injury and flame our risks are high, but the best place to find that front line pitching is far and away from the high school ranks. If you combine International, College, and Junior College, then they ended up equaling high school pitchers, which is how big the divide is.

Now, if you thought that was drastic, well one round, in particular, has had 53% of the Ace pitchers, and that round is the first. There were 37 players taken in round one who made my cut off. The next best round was round eight with nine pitchers, then round 4 with eight pitchers, and lastly, round two with six pitchers. There were a total of 57 drafted players who made the list, and only 20 were not from the first round. There is little doubt if you want to find frontline starters, then you should look in round one. (One interesting twist was the guys with lower velocity or ground ball guys where often the players taken in round eight i.e. Derek Lowe or Brandon Webb, which showed a correlation between velocity and draft position.)

This showed me that TINSTAAPP, there is no such thing as a pitching prospect, is basically BS. The only way to get a frontline starter is by finding a prospect and finding him early. Aces are all solid prospects, and the majority are high picks, you have a better chance of finding a hitter latter than a pitcher with All-Star upside.

So if you go back and combine this with my piece from April is does propose quite the quandary do you risk a high flameout rate and draft a high school pitcher, or do you go for the hitter and hope you might be able to flip him for an arm later. At the end of my other article, I said I would avoid pitchers early well now I have to contradict myself. The risk is worth it to me, and it shows that the Indians, like any team, should stick to their board. It should not matter what your system looks like you take the player who you think will give you the best chance to succeed.

If you read my Big Board last week, you can see why this is very relevant. The Indians currently have two first-rounders. They have their own plus a competitive balance pick. I think they end up with a third when they offer arbitration to Jiménez before he signs with another team. So the Indians could easily end up with three picks in the top 35. In a draft that is loaded with high school arms, that is the strength of the draft. I had 24 pitchers on my top 35 for next year, and 14 of those were high school arms. Next year might be the perfect year for the Indians to swing for the fences and see if they can find their future Ace.


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