Looking in the Mirror: Analyzing my 2008 MLB Draft Board

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The NFL Draft just happened and every football fan now has more hope than they did last week, well most do. The NFL draft has immediate player impact while the MLB draft doesn't. All the players are taken out of college and by that logic, more immediate impact and that should lead to greater accuracy in drafting, right? Well, I'm not going to break down NFL teams or their draft picks, I'm going to look at prognosticators, like myself. I thought it would be interesting to compare myself to the NFL guru, Mel Kiper, Jr. I didn't do any of the research myself. Deadspin did that for me.

They looked at the 2008 NFL draft and to my surprise, NFL has a WAR like stat called WCAV. Deadspin posted his top 20 and the top 20 WCAV players. He had only four matches or 20 percent accuracy. That's poor at best.

It got me wondering how poorly I did in 2008. That was the first year I published a top 100 ranking and was bad at it. I didn't work a tenth as hard as I do now and laughed when I looked at the list with Shooter Hunt ahead of Lance Lynn, Alex Meyer and Gerrit Cole.

I used the highest 20 bWAR values from the 2008 draft and compared it to my top 20 and I was..disappointed. I only got four right as well. Buster Posey, Aaron Crow, Gordon Beckham and Yonder Alonso. On the other hand, Hosmer still has a shot to get in there as well considering the 20^th person only has 2 WAR.

Kiper only deals with College players and for the most part, those are the players who have made an impact. What if I just use the top 20 college performers? Well, it improves to 6 for 20. That's better but still worse than I would hope. Pedro Alvarez, Posey, Crow, Beckham, Alonso and Lance Lynn. I was hoping for better but maybe over the next few years the results will improve. Kiper did go 7 for 20 in 2003. I'd get to 7 if Brian Matusz out paces Louis Coleman by more than .1 WAR going forward, so it's close.

I expect my success to be better going forward but I also thinks it takes more than five years in baseball to make a conclusion. I will continue to look back and see how I did in this macro comparison. Coming up, I will look at my 2008 shadow draft and post an update to my Shadow System going into the draft.