Atlanta Braves recent draft history, Part 1: position players
By Fred Owens
The Atlanta Braves dismissal of Roy Clark and Brian Bridges and hiring of Dana Brown left the fans wanting to know more about the Braves recent draft history.
My post about Dana Brown’s background led to comments requesting more details about Brown’s history and that of the Atlanta Braves over the same period.
Rather than post answers in the comments and have to repeat them later, I’m providing that information in two posts. It takes two because of the amount of detail involved.
This post is the result of a question asked by Ken (you’ll get a bill for consulting hours on this one) as well as other data that seemed interesting as I churned through the spreadsheets.
This is only raw data. It’s easy to infer tendencies from the data, but decisions are also based on internal team philosophies, proprietary metric weights, cash considerations, and team leadership’s view of future needs. All of this affects how teams perceive prospects and make their choices.
Scouts keep their jobs because they know their business. In the end, the success or failure of a prospect almost entirely down to the player. Scouts and analytics can only report on/analyze what they see and how that projects.
Given enough talent, a scout rate a player highly, but that prospect’s personality, life choices, and commitment are critical to his success as a player as his talent.
Just as front offices make bad decisions leading up to and during the draft, talented people fail to make it while people with less talent and a better work ethic often become stars.
Methodology
I keep a running record of all Atlanta Braves Rule 4 drafts using the Baseball Reference draft pages as my source. Other data used came from Fangraphs.
After updating that record, I created custom reports on Fangraphs to get total production information for the players concerned. The data generated a ton of numbers and presenting all of them would make your eyes glaze over.
That might be ideal for those who can’t get to sleep, but it’s overkill for providing the answers. Limiting content to essential numbers still creates a lot of noise, but I’ll keep it as short and pithy as possible.