2020 MLB Draft: How The Incomplete College Season Impacts The First Round

Image credit: Marlins OF JJ Bleday (Photo by Tom DiPace)

Scouting departments use many information sources to inform their draft selections, but for the first time ever they will be missing key data this year.

The coronavirus pandemic upended life in the U.S. in mid-March, introducing concepts such as self-quarantining and social distancing into our everyday vernacular. The pandemic also threw the baseball world into disarray, forcing the suspension of spring training and the cancellation of the spring season for high school and college athletes.

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While scouts have a long history with the top amateur prospects for the 2020 draft—particularly the college players—any intel gathered this spring would have been valuable. For an example of how quickly draft fortunes can change, look no further than the Marlins’ top two picks in the 2019 draft.

Vanderbilt outfielder JJ Bleday played his way up the board all spring and landed with Miami at No. 4 overall after compiling a 1.125 OPS in Southeastern Conference play for a team that would become national champions. Missouri outfielder Kameron Misner went the other way, hitting just .222 with two home runs in SEC play and falling to the Marlins at No. 35, the top pick in the supplemental first round.

With the 2020 college season halted before conference play even began, scouting departments will have to make due without valuable performance data this year—to say nothing of seeing how players handle the pressurized environment of the NCAA Tournament.

While we don’t know how this information deficit will impact major league organizations’ decisions on draft day, here’s what we do know.

As a group, college sophomores outperform freshmen. College juniors outperform sophomores. College seniors would outperform juniors if the best of them weren’t skimmed off the top and drafted into professional baseball.

Such a progression makes sense in college baseball, where players not only mature physically and emotionally year to year, but many aspects of their playing conditions remain constant. Players return each year to the same facilities, to the same conferences, to play many of the same opponents, against many of the same coaching staffs and in many of the same ballparks.

Contrast that with the life of a minor league player at the same point in his development. He will play in a different league each season—and sometimes multiple leagues in one season—against widely varied opponents from wildly different backgrounds and in ballpark contexts that are not only different from one another but sometimes exaggeratedly so.

The minor leagues, with a stepped progression in difficulty level, are designed to master the majority of players who participate. Collectively, minor league players perform better as they age, but only by small margins.

The opposite is true for college players. Owing to familiarity and personal growth, the best collegians master their surroundings during three or four years at school, a fact reflected in the data. College players incrementally improve their performance each year from age 19 to 21, the typical baseball ages for college freshmen, sophomores and juniors.

The data for college hitters looks like this, where HR/200 is home run rate per 200 plate appearances.

Age	Class	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	ISO	BB%	SO%	HR/200	OPS
19	FR	160	.283	.364	.402	.118	9.3	16.8	3.1	.766
20	SO	184	.296	.379	.433	.137	9.6	15.8	3.8	.811
21	JR	198	.299	.384	.446	.147	9.9	15.2	4.2	.830
22	SR	196	.299	.382	.442	.144	9.6	15.1	4.2	.825

Note that there are players who enter college as 18-year-olds and leave older than 22. The data for those age groups is materially the same as what is displayed above at the extremes. Also keep in mind that the performance decline between ages 21 and 22 is an illusion created by hundreds of the best juniors departing college baseball for pro ball.

The data for college pitchers looks like this, where FIP is fielding independent pitching, a metric that expresses pitchers’ strikeout, walk and home run rates like an ERA.

Age	Class	IP	ERA	WHIP	H/9	HR/9	BB/9	SO/9	SO/BB	FIP
19	FR	43	4.36	1.42	9.20	0.62	3.6	7.1	1.97	3.72
20	SO	52	4.13	1.39	9.10	0.60	3.4	7.4	2.19	3.56
21	JR	55	4.02	1.36	9.00	0.58	3.2	7.5	2.30	3.46
22	SR	53	4.14	1.38	9.30	0.60	3.2	7.1	2.26	3.54

The same caveats apply to pitchers as apply to batters. Pitchers younger than 19 or older than 22 perform at virtually the same rates as those specific age groups. Also, the performance dropoff from age 21 to 22 is entirely a function of the juniors with the best stuff being drafted by major league organizations.

The tables above contain data from the Power Five Conferences—Atlantic Coast, Big 12, Big Ten, Southeastern and Pacific-12—and the Big West Conference, home to historical baseball powers Cal State Fullerton and Long Beach State. The sample covers the years 2002 through 2017 and includes all batters with 50 plate appearances in a season and all pitchers with 15 innings in a season.

The data is quite clear on one point: College juniors play the most and perform the best across every metric. Seniors more or less maintain those performance levels despite high attrition to pro ball.

But there are two under-the-surface data trends that merit attention:

(1) As a group, college players make “the leap” as sophomores—or, more specifically, at a baseball age of 20 years old. That is the season in which players, in the aggregate, make the largest year-over-year improvement in performance. Batters improve their OPS by 6 percent from their freshman to sophomore years and pitchers lower the ERAs by 5 percent.

(2) College players who go on to become first-round draft picks are the exceptions to the rule above. They show growth as sophomores, as the sample indicates, but they show even more growth as juniors. In a sense, that performance spike at age 21, as the scouting world scrutinizes their every move, authenticates them as first-round picks.

Many players who develop into first-round picks improved in linear fashion—and dramatically so—from their freshman year to their junior year, with top-level summer competition with Team USA or in the Cape Cod League serving as corroborating evidence.

The table below spells out the extent to which first-round college players improved from one year to the next. The sample includes more than 70 first-round position players and more than 70 first-round pitchers from the 2004 to 2017 drafts. All players sampled were regulars or semi-regulars for at least three years at the same Power Five or Big West program.

		FIRST-ROUND BATTERS			FIRST-ROUND PITCHERS
Age	Class	AVG	HR	OPS	ERA	WHIP	FIP
19	FR	—	—	—	—	—	—
20	SO	6.5%	29.4%	10.7%	-6.7%	-4.6%	-9.0%
21	JR	7.0%	34.5%	11.4%	-19.7%	-9.1%	-13.0%

Whereas the typical college player will improve the most dramatically as a sophomore, the typical collegiate first-round pick will improve dramatically as a sophomore—and then raise his performance level even more as a junior.

Many college players in this year’s draft class have already made the sophomore year performance leap—and many first-round candidates also have meaningful summer wood bat experience—but every single junior, because of circumstances beyond his control, receives an “incomplete” for the 2020 season.

That raises the stakes for scouting departments that have come to depend on valuable junior year intel to inform first-round selections. But for fans coping with severe baseball deprivation, the incomplete season adds a layer of intrigue to a 2020 draft that will be perhaps the most anticipated ever.