Posted by donaldjl on 8/17/2017 8:23:00 PM (view original):
Just out of curiousity. How often have the crayon wielders been close enough on projections that it has been more beneficial to grab that guy and skip the "marginal" bench warmer?
Often enough. In most drafts my $20M scouts see 3-5 all-stars, another 10-12 legit major league guys, and maybe another 15 or so guys with a limited role (def SS/C, speed/bsr guys, low dur/sta relievers, etc.) If your other side is 0M, you'll see maybe a dozen prospects on that side total, including late round trash. If your other side is 6M, you'll see 100-150 more guys, with ratios about 1/3 to 1/2 what your "strong" side sees. You can't draft guys who aren't on your draft board, and if you're putting serious cash into amateur scouting, it's a reasonable value proposition to add another quarter to third of that money to tack on another 100-150 guys into your potential draft pool.
The thing about amateur drafts is that the player rating patterns don't deviate much, so with a little practice and spending a little time looking back at the draft later on, you can see where the scouting engine is fuzzy and make adjustments. Even on the very fuzzy projections, not every individual projection is fuzzy, and the individual inaccurate projections are not random. Through pattern recognition you can identify which projections are out of place and so are likely bad. Once you do that you can begin to see what more reasonable projections are likely to be and you can slot those 4M-6M players back into your draft order based on the more reasonable projections.