Greetings,

I'd like to punt on one type of scouting/drafting so I can put more budget into the other. Would you put the resources into College scouting/drafting or do you favor High School?

How much does proximity to peak age factor in? It seems it would be better if your team is somewhat competitive to draft college players because once their 3-4 years of development occur they will be close to their age 27 peak season. But it seems in HBD players get 3-4 years of development regardless of age so it's not like an 18 year-old is going to have more years of development than a 22 year-old college player. If so, then the high school kid might be better because their career can be longer.

Is there any material difference in the size of the prospect pools between College and High School? Or some material quality difference?

Thanks for your thoughts and advice!!!

Posted by bripat42 on 1/19/2021 2:50:00 PM (view original):
If there's a trend in your world(s), go against the trend. You can't see individual team budget amounts, but you can see the average for the world. If one is, say, $9M and the other is, say, $11M, put your money in the one that averages $9M per team.

+1

You’ll find top talent in both.

All other things being equal, far fewer COL prospects "hold out." That tiebreaker has me in COL more than HS.

great advice...thanks!

You will see fewer than the 500 players on your draft board if you go all HS and 0 for COL. It can be a positive since you will sign college guys in the later rounds with ? for their ratings. Sometimes these players can be decent ML players. Don't bet on it, but it does happen.

After years and years of going for HS players I switched to college not long after the fuzzy ratings. In the past I found I could draft a HS kid at 18, have him go through my minors for 4 years and 95 times out of 100 become a serviceable ML’er. After a few seasons of having hitters and pitchers project to over 90 splits only to end up topping out at 67 I made the switch.

If we were able to switch our budgets as much as we wanted every season I would only pick college if I was picking top 15 and pick HS if I wasn’t. I have found HS is bigger risk bigger reward (I drafted 2 HS kids that went on to become hall of famers in the late 20’s).

At one point I had one of my teams with 20 million in College scouting, and the other team with 20 million in HS. I transitioned the HS team to 20 million in College, for most of the reasons already stated.

I don't think you get "better" top-end players from either source. Game wouldn't make sense if it were biased one way or the other. I just find drafting from College less annoying. First of all, of the 200-ish prospects you see, only half of them will even be decent AA players. Your minor league teams will always be crap (I know, no one else cares) and you'll be drafting some of those crap players in the 5th, 6th, 7th rounds. Wasted signing bonus money. So I would take the extra step of filtering out the total loser prospects and moving them down below the ??? players. More work.

And yes, more players who actually want to sign contracts and start playing.

I would agree with most here, look at your average league spending. One thing I would add though, in my opinion I wouldn't really base your decision off whether you need a guy now vs. later. In my experience the difference in the amount of time for High School players to develop vs. College is a year maybe 2. I would rather invest in the strategy that yields the best players rather than a strategy that maybe gets lesser players to me faster.

very good points, all....sincere thanks!

I'm in 5 leagues, and the average is that HS scouting budgets is $1mm more than College.

FWIW, at least one person cares how his minor league teams do...me. "If they're giving out a trophy, I want it." Mostly because with a decent team I can experiment better. platoons, impact of having a better pitch-calling catcher...now trying using an opener...seeing impact of different managerial settings...maybe I'm misguided, but it seems the experiments are "truer" with a better team, such as it doesn't matter if you have a better pitch caller if every starter is a schlub.