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He's Got The Babyface (The New Market Inefficiency?)

LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr Oct 14 2011 09:50 AM

A really interesting piece here by Rany Jazayerli for BP on player evaluation and the draft. Any time a team misses on a player the way almost every organization in baseball missed on [Mike] Trout, there’s bound to be some soul-searching: what did we miss? Many times, there’s no satisfactory answer to that question. Albert Pujols was a 13th-round pick in 1999, and less than two years later was one of the best baseball players in the world—and even today, no one has been able to adequately explain why every organization in baseball misjudged him so badly. In Trout’s case, there’s one astoundingly obvious reason why he was underrated going into the draft. It’s one of the most basic pieces of information we have about a player, a piece of information that precisely because of its ubiquity is almost always ignored: his date of birth.

Frayed Knot Oct 14 2011 10:40 AM Re: He's Got The Babyface (The New Market Inefficiency?)

I was (sort of) thinking about this when the Mets drafted Brandon Nimmo back in June. Not that he was younger than the average HS-er (18 + 3 months seems about average for a HS player) but, that with his home state of Wyoming not having a HS baseball program, Nimmo played his youth baseball in an American Legion league which hadn't yet started when the draft took place. IOW, he was the age of a HS senior but wouldn't, in effect, have played his senior league ball yet (the league ran from June thru Aug) and therefore he would have had more development time between his draft and his signing. Or at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.