Deconstructing the first round of fantasy baseball drafts
— -- Here's a troubling thought: For all the agonizing we do about whom to pick in the first round of fantasy drafts, two-thirds of the time, we are going to be wrong.
It's true. A scan of first-round Average Draft Position rankings (ADPs) over the past 12 years shows that our success rate in picking the players who return top-15 earnings is about 34 percent. In fact, that percentage has been declining in recent years.
The only players who earned a spot somewhere in the top 15 were Trout, Kershaw, Goldschmidt and Altuve.
Of the remaining 11 players, Stanton, Cabrera and Gomez fell short due to injury. McCutchen, Abreu, Bautista, Encarnacion and Rizzo had fine seasons but weren't good enough to crack the top 15. Hernandez, Jones and Tulowitzki were disappointments.
Let's look at the players who returned top-15 earnings last year, along with their ADPs coming into the season:
What typically happens is the previous year's top earners migrate into this season's projected earners. As expected, 10 of the above 15 players hold strong positions in current ADPs, but there is a good deal of recency bias baked into that expectation.
We are conditioned to think elite players will continue to be elite players, even if a high level performance was in just one season. At the same time, we know logically that you can't project performance from one year's data. It's a conflict in which logic often loses.
A scan of this year's top-ranked players reveals a rather eclectic mix.
First there are the veteran first-round earners. These are players who have proven they belong in this tier and have returned elite value consistently in the past. It's no surprise that Trout, Goldschmidt and Kershaw are the headliners here.
To this group, we add the probable 2016 rebounds. These are the vets who had been consistent first-round earners in the past but fell short in 2015 for a number of reasons. If they were hurt, an offseason to recuperate could bring them right back to elite levels, but there remains some risk. These are players such as Cabrera, Stanton and McCutchen. Frankly, a healthy season could land any of them in the top 15 -- or even top five.
I'd add a fourth player to this group. He is someone who won't go anywhere near the first round this year but had been an elite earner in 2013 and 2014. Shouldn't Carlos Gomez be getting more love?
A third group are new first-round earners. These are players who rose into the first round for the first time in 2015. Do they have staying power? Without a track record of high level earnings, we don't know for sure. Recency bias might be driving their draft slot, but we know they've done it once. These are players such as Donaldson, Machado and Arenado.
It's tough to believe, but Harper belongs in this group as well. As much as we were waiting for his 2015 breakout for four years, this was the first time he actually earned first-round value. We can assume but truly don't know whether it is a repeatable performance.
The final group are the potential 2016 risers. These are players who have never earned first-round value but have shown enough in the recent past that drafters are willing to speculate on their upside. This is a high-risk, high-reward strategy.
Anthony Rizzo is technically part of this group because he has never finished higher than last year's No. 19. But that's pretty close to top 15 and certainly enough to being included among the other elite players.
Where it gets more risky is with Carlos Correa and Kris Bryant. Correa finished No. 89 overall last year, though in only 427 plate appearances. Bryant finished at No. 34, which is at least closer to the Promised Land. Recency bias drives these rankings as well, along with a healthy dose of wishful thinking and fear of missing out.
It's interesting how players such as these make such huge jumps in ADP, but the rankings are a product of multi-month evolution. When we say "average draft position," it's thought to mean the public consensus of where players should be slotted. But it has to start somewhere, and that starting point is important.
What tends to happen is the first published lists and mock drafts, held in the fall, ranked players a certain way. The next lists and mocks fed off the first ones. The more that were published, the more we drafted a certain way. Before we knew it, we reached a critical mass of opinion. The rankings became less about reality and more about groupthink. For example, in the fall, someone decided that the excitement of owning the next great potential superstar trumped the reality of fewer than 500 at-bats of Major League experience. That person opened the door by ranking Correa among the 10 best players in baseball, which gave everyone else permission to do the same thing.
If your Correa pick pays off, you look like a genius, even though odds are it will have been an at-par purchase at best. There is no profit on those types of picks. If Correa fails, you can write it off to any litany of excuses. That's a defensible approach in a later round. It's tougher to justify when you're putting a first-round pick on the line.
More importantly, you don't have to draft one way just because everyone else does. The ADP's 34 percent correct track record is proof that four months of groupthink usually amounts to getting it wrong.
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