Discussion: The Draft

This was meant to be part of Sunday night's discussion on the minor league rosters, as the two are related, but that thread was getting long, so I wanted to break it out into its own discussion.

I have two suggestions to make for the draft. One goes hand-in-hand with the proposed rookie league that was proposed on Sunday night, and the other will increase the quality of drafted players.

First, I propose to move the draft from its current date on March 1st until June 1st. At present, the amateur feeding high school and college seasons run in the spring, and end in late May. If we keep the current draft date of 3/1/2028 for the next draft, the players who will be drafted have not played since May 2027. Sitting around for 10 months does nothing for their development.

Moving the draft to June 1st will also allow our proposed rookie league to start then, and also add a wrinkle to the trading of draft picks, as the season will be underway as the draft happens, and teams will have two months to assess their situation before deciding to unload or trade for draft picks.

I can't think of a reason why we would not want to move the draft back three months.

One reason why teams trade draft picks is the value of those picks is greatest before they are turned into actual tangible "prospects". I did about ten seasons (shameful, I know, compared to Zev's testing for budget purposes, but I was limited on time, sorry!) and tweaked the number of rounds in the draft, as well as the number in the Generate Players for X Rounds setting, and counted the number of 3 star-or-greater prospects (as judged by the OSA) that were available when the draft pools were announced.

For the record, our league currently has a 15 round draft, and will generate players for 20 rounds. We use the feeder leagues (high school and college) and additional players. In the league settings screen (which only Zev and I can access, I believe), it tells me that 42 additional players will be created for the next draft class. Having players available for 5 extra rounds means that 60 players will go undrafted each year.

I tested various configurations, and found that when the number of rounds is half that of the number of generated players, the quality of draft-eligible players increases. With 15 rounds and 30 rounds worth of players (360 eligible players), there were 24 3-star-or-higher prospects available. That's enough 3-star prospects to cover the first two rounds. When I increased the number of rounds of generated players to 50, there were 43 3-star-or-higher-prospects. And, with both increased draft pool sizes, there were still plenty of decent 1.5* guys left undrafted to be signed as a free agent.

I propose increasing the number of rounds of players generated for the draft to be increased to 30 from 20, and keeping the number of rounds as 15. However, if we need to populate the new rookie league that may happen, then we should go to 25 rounds with 50 rounds of players. I think though, that creating an unsigned draftee free agent frenzy after the draft would be fun, also there are always quirks with drafting that a team might end up with seven shortstops and no pitchers (Something like that once happened to me.)

So, in conclusion, I have two proposals tonight:

1. Move the draft date back from 3/1 to 6/1 each year.
2. Change the number of rounds of generated players to be twice that of the number of rounds we draft.

Any comments, or other draft-related suggestions?