Finding Starters in the Draft

Wednesday, June 06 2007 @ 10:00 AM EDT

How frequently do teams find stud pitchers after the first (and supplemental first) round?

I was curious myself so I decided to look at rounds 2-10 from the 1990-1999 drafts.  That gives 10 years of drafts and enough time for pitchers to establish themselves.  The new draft database at baseball-reference.com makes this really easy.

A data table..... Magpie would be proud!

	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1990					M Hampton
1991			Paul Byrd				J Schmidt
							B Radke
							D Lowe
							Traschel
1992	Jon Leiber
1993	J Suppan	M Clement			B Moehler
1994			Vazquez
1995	Washburn	Dempster	R Ortiz				AJ Burnett
	B Tomko	B Arroyo
1996				B Penny					D Davis
1997	Randy Wolf				Tim Hudson
1998
1999	J Lackey			Robertson	Erik Bedard		Capuano
					A Harang

In rounds 2-10 over 10 years there were 26 pitchers who became at least decent starters, and in some cases I'm being generous.  If you take out the second round there's just 20 over a ten year period, or 2 each year on average.

What's odd is the 8th round in 1991.  Schmidt, Radke, Lowe and Traschel all came out of that round and Paul Byrd is the only other successful starter in rounds 2-10.

So if you're going to end up with a stud pitcher you better select him early in the draft because there aren't very many pitchers slipping through the cracks.

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