Yankees Draft Review, Pt. 1

Let's start with an overview.  In general, the modern 40 round draft is an overly controlled market that penalizes good teams and rewards bad ones. Because each team is giving a differet pool number to use for their first 10 rounds of drafting, there is no meritocracy, which you are more likely to see in the other 3 drafts.  So what's a late picking good team like the Yanks really able to accomplish in one, especially when they're vast resources are whittled down to an enforced 10 round of pool + 5%  budget of 7,828.065?  It turns out quite a bit.

The primary job of the domestic amateur scouts is to beat the bushes for young talent, and use the 40 round draft is to grow the talent pool and market the team to the unsignable kids they select for either future drafting or future free agency.

The Yankees got a lot of both done. First, they addressed the organizational need for left handed pitching and power. Secondly, althugh the draft had an unusutal shape in terms of when they took preps, they will end up getting a lot of, at least marketing, done there, too.

Let's talk about lefties.

The original Yankee stadium was both the House that Ruth Built and the House Built for Ruth. With a short rightfield porch and a deep right center, that hurt but couldn't destroy the great DiMaggio, but helped the crap out of Gomez, Ford, Guidry and slews of others. Before there was a draft, the Yanks would search far and wide for guys that fit the stadium, and that's how they found Lou, Dickey, Keller, Yogi and finally, Murcer and traded for guys like Maris, Nettles. Chambliss, Spencer, Paulie and Tino.  Oh, and they also picked up Reggie, and Giambi along the way in FA.

So you get it.  Even as the park got smaller and steroids made all parks small for awhile, it kept rewarding lefties.

So two things happened when the Amateur Draft started, both of them bad for the Yankees. First, they could no longer use Tom Greenwade and Yankee greeen to cast a wide net around the country's lefties. Second, the draft made sure they would have to share the left talent with other teams, who most of the time got first crack at it.

The Yankees then, somewhat sefl-destructively, stared to over value left handedness in both hitter and pitcher and overdrafting the hell out of them during most of the drafts (though they did find Don Mattingly that way, though late, late, late and not an overdraft at all) until Damon Oppenheimer started running them.

Oppenheimer, importantly took the organizational focus off of handedness and put it squarely on talent and character. That's why we have righties like Judge and Betances having such a huge roll in the rebuild.

At the same time Damon stopped reaching for lefites he realized the balance was shifting the other way.   He knew that for years but had to wait for the right year to finally add some balance back into the lefty/righty prospect pool.

This was the year. The Yanks, starting with their competitive balance pick at 38, took 9 left handed pitchers. That's almost a quarter of their draft, and they haven't done that in forever, so you know that no compromises were made.  As for left handed hitter, starting with their second round pick, they took 7 left handed bats and one switch hitter. So they didn't completely balance things, which would have meant reaching, but they out did the general population's balance between lefties and righties, and substantially inreased the lefty talent pool in the organization.

In Part 2, we'll look at the Prep Picks.