Improving ESPN's Franchise Player Draft

ESPN.com had an afternoon long feature today that brought baseball writers and analysts from inside and outside ESPN together to draft the 30 franchise players in baseball. The results are here. As with anything that brings baseball minds from the saber and non-saber spheres together, there were a number of head scratching picks. While I liked the idea, there are a number of ways it can be improved.

First, there needs to be clearly defined rules. The only instructions given (at least for the public) for the ESPN draft was, "who would be your franchise player?" This is pretty open ended. Obviously, the goal of any major league team is to win games, but bringing the "franchise player" into the discussion could bring other goals like marketability to the forefront. So the first improvement is to say the only goal is to maximize wins over the life of the league.

Next, the issue of money and salaries is often more important than player skill. We know this is true because year after year, the 25 best players in an organization do not make the major league team. Rather, top prospects, who are ready to contribute now, are kept in the minors to decrease service time and miss the dreaded super two classification. It's not exactly clear if salaries were accounted for in the ESPN draft. At one point the moderator, David Kull, says (at 12:06), "Contract status has no bearing on this draft." But then Karl Ravech uses Tulowitzki's contract as a reason for picking him first overall (at 12:15). As Mike Fast pointed out on Twitter, selecting younger prospects with cost controlled years left was a good strategy. There's an easy way to fix this. Wipe out every player's existing salary and allow participants to offer each player contracts with varying years and values. If each drafter is given a set budget (I'd suggest a PV lump sum), drafters can build a team of players that can be evaluated on both future performance and cost. Doing an auction draft like this would require the player pool to be expanded to more than 30 players, but the 30 highest paid players could be seen as the franchise players (even if two are on one team).

I'd be really interested in seeing a panel of experts doing this exercise. I think the results would be slightly different than the ESPN snake draft and it would be fun to see what type of contracts prospects like Mike Trout and Bryce Harper would merit.

For reference, here are the 30 top WAR leaders from 2006-2011.


How many of these guys would have been selected back in the 2006 draft? Some of them- Pujols, A-Rod, Wright, Beltran, etc- would have been sure fire picks. Tim Lincecum was drafted this week and given the concerns about his motion and size, it's extremely doubtful he would have been picked. It's also likely a draft would have included Andruw Jones, Ryan Howard, Vernon Wells, and Travis Hafner to name a few. Likewise, sitting atop the 2006 pitching WAR leaderboard were a quartet of young pitchers who surely would have merited serious consideration- Johan Santana, Brandon Webb, Jeremy Bonderman, and John Lackey.

Everyone knows projecting the future is a fool's exercise at best. It's hard enough to project what a player will do this year (see Asdrubal Cabrera, Lance Berkman, etc), let alone for the foreseeable future. Given the task, however, I would like to see a group tackle this in a more scientific way: We all know auction fantasy drafts are superior to snake drafts.