Recently held the Amateur Draft in one of my world's. I'm in the process of a long-term rebuild, so I maxed out my HS scouting. Also spent 12MIL in CS. I held the #10 pick, and was happy with my choice. BUT, after looking deeper into the draft results, my scouts didn't see 7 of the top 50 choices in the draft that came out of HS. Total, my scouts didn't see 12 of the top 50 in the draft. I get that spending 12MIL in CS won't get me all the college picks. However, spending 20MIL in HS scouting should get you 7 of the choices. In total, I missed the #2, #5, #8, #25, #41, and #47 picks that were out of HS. So, I submitted a ticket. The response I received was the "look at this article about how you won't see all the draft picks..." I get it; the engine isn't built this way, but, it should be. It's beyond ludicrous to spend that much of your budget and not get results. Frankly, seeing the projections of each of the guys I missed would have drastically changed my draft board.

I've played this game for a pretty long time, and it's now less fun because of crap like this. You used to be able to be subpar, put money in the draft, and rebuild your team from the farm. You could play a little moneyball and be successful. Why would anyone try to build their farm system if you can't see prospects when you put money into scouting? It's exceptionally unrealistic to have a deep scouting budget, and not see nearly 20% of the draft pool in the top 50. You may want to say, "your scouts must suck." Well, then give me an option to hire a scouting director that doesn't instead of making Fielding Instructors worth 3-5 mil per year. Or get rid of the stupid bench coach at the ML level that is basically useless. I'm getting to the point that I am about to only invest the budget into payroll, and only focus on the ML level. I'll let the rest of my world owners throw money at scouting and development and I'll just sign type A's and B's and give up my top 3 rounds of the draft. I'll never win on the farm, but at least my ML team will always be .500.

There is a high probability that the 12 guys you didnt see werent really top 50 caliber players.

On the flip side . . . you're seeing HS prospects that other owners who may have $20m in HS scouting are not seeing.

In the end . . . it all evens out.

I bet that a majority of the teams in your world spend high on HS scouting. The 18yr olds that were drafted dont look very studly and there were a lot of HS guys drafted early in what looks like a weak HS draft.

Way too many factors, but as tec said, it's all done to redistribute the talent pool. I usually draft in the 20s; since the scouting changes were made I rely more on the draft now than I did before... because better players are more available later. Used to be that anything after #15 you were just praying to get an actual major league player.

So, for every one of you, there's one of me. And I actually hope that more guys abandon the draft.

At $20m scouting over the past 10 or so drafts it's been my experience that I miss about 10% of the top 30. Looks like your a little over that but within reason.

Yes, the guys drafted above probably weren't as high quality as what I got at 10. Yes, I know I probably saw more depth than others. Yes, I probably ended up with a better draft haul in the long run. But, it's just not even close to realistic for a team to not know that a top 50 talent exists, much less a top 100 talent. Do you think that a major league franchise goes, "who is this Bubba Thompson guy the Rangers took at 26?" No, that would be insane. Maybe they said, "I can't believe Thompson didn't go higher?" Like #4 to the Rays like Baseball America projected. Or, "the Rangers reached at 26 with Bubba Thompson." But, they'd never say, "I never heard of that talented kid who hit .429 with 11 homers and 18 stolen bases at a 7A Alabama high school..." In this day and age of scouting services and media attention it is simply not reality to say "this draft choice wasn't even on my board." Definitely not the #2, #5, and #8 overall picks. There should be 1 draft pool that we all see. The current/projected talent and ratings should be directly related to the amount spent.

'Wasn't scouted well enough'

not

'wasn't scouted at all'

Maybe the guy they went to see who was #2 went 0-12 in the 3 games they watched him in. So when the projections came out they said 'I don't believe those to be accurate. You should probably just avoid that guy because he 'wasn't scouted well enough'.

We no longer see currents.

Anyway, this is a way to avoid 100% certainty in the draft. Nothing more, nothing less. Unlike MLB, our projected 81 is always better than the projected 65. But, if you look at MLB drafts, you'll see plenty of guys in the first round who never played an inning in MLB. But somebody damn sure thought they were good enough to be taken #4 overall. We seldom get that. So we get players we just don't know about.

Posted by hockey1984 on 7/17/2017 2:59:00 PM (view original):
'Wasn't scouted well enough'

not

'wasn't scouted at all'

Maybe the guy they went to see who was #2 went 0-12 in the 3 games they watched him in. So when the projections came out they said 'I don't believe those to be accurate. You should probably just avoid that guy because he 'wasn't scouted well enough'.

This is precisely my point. 'Wasn't scouted well enough' should at least give that the player exists, and some semblance of what he may become. I can't even rank a guy that my scouting says 'wasn't scouted well enough.' That's BS. I should know he's a player that's going to be drafted. Let's say that these 12 players were reaches by other teams and should have been drafted in rounds 3-6, or 6-25. Fine. But, you should SEE the player. Not being on the draft board is just ludicrous.

I'll tell you this...the day I spend 20/20 in the draft and don't see the best player in the draft is the day I'll be out of this game. My wife will love the extra $8.95 a month.

Is that the cost of batteries these days?

Posted by slashtc on 7/17/2017 3:32:00 PM (view original):
Is that the cost of batteries these days?

LOL, I prefer to call it a maintenance cost.

mburgy did you look down at the end of the prospect list there are players with ?? in all categories. The players are in there, are you wanting instead of the "??" you want to see just random numbers that are way off?

Six guys who've never made the bigs were drafted ahead of Mike Trout.

Posted by mktulu2 on 7/17/2017 4:18:00 PM (view original):
mburgy did you look down at the end of the prospect list there are players with ?? in all categories. The players are in there, are you wanting instead of the "??" you want to see just random numbers that are way off?

I don't have a single prospect in the "Amateur Draft Prospects" page that has a single ?? in it. I have 500 fully scouted players. These guys are simply not in my prospects list.