March 28, 2013

BP Announcements

Introducing: Dissecting the Draft

by Nick J. Faleris

Printer-friendly

Contact Author

As we roll the calendar over to April, Baseball Prospectus will be ramping up our draft coverage.  As has been previously noted, we are fortunate to have partnered with Perfect Game USA, who will be providing first-rate analysis of draft prospects, draft class rankings, and mock drafts as we get closer to June.

In addition to Perfect Game’s content, I will be continuing the “Scouting the Draft" Series, providing look-ins on players throughout the remainder of the spring, including scouting notes and player video. Further, we will be starting next week with a new draft series, “Dissecting the Draft." 

Over the past five years, as part of my draft research, I have conducted “Shadow Drafts” on each draft day, selecting a team and making my own picks in real time for each of that team’s selections. The first year went just five rounds deep, and the next year 10 rounds. The last three years went 20 rounds deep (which is where we will keep it for this year).

The “Dissecting the Draft” series will be a look into the draft process—profiling potential targets for different portions of the draft, and formulating a draft strategy for days one and two of the draft. It will be an opportunity to discuss some of the intricacies of player evaluation, as well as some of the issues that go hand in hand with spring scouting and draft profiling that might not always be apparent.

The goal is to bring BP readers along for the ride as we peel back the layers of the draft class onion and work to get a deeper understanding of the draft and its role in Major League Baseball. We’ll have the player blurbs and scouting reports you are used to seeing from multiple media outlets, but “Dissecting the Draft” is going to challenge us all to dig a little deeper in attempting to understand draft strategy and the process of fully profiling draft prospects (beyond brief scouting reports).

I’m excited to get started, and I hope you are too. I'll be taking questions in today’s 1 PM ET draft/prospect chat here at BP.

Nick J. Faleris is a practicing structured finance attorney and Sports Industry team member in the Milwaukee office of Foley & Lardner LLP. The views he expresses in Baseball Prospectus are his own, and not necessarily those of the law firm.

Nick J. Faleris is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @NickJFaleris
Click here to see Nick's other articles. You can contact Nick by clicking here