How much is picking one slot earlier in next summer’s draft worth? It’s a valid question for the Cubs as they enter a two-game set with the Twins, who “trail” them by a game and a half in the reverse standings. As things stand, the Cubs hold the seventh overall pick, but with the Nationals and Marlins within a game and a half on the other side, it’s conceivable Jed Hoyer’s crew could rise as high as fifth, and with the Royals, Rockies, and even perhaps the Tigers not out of reach on the other side and the Mets holding the eleventh pick after deciding against signing Kumar Rocker, picking as late as twelfth isn’t off the table.
The bonus pool—the amount of money teams are allowed to spend on draft picks in the first ten rounds before paying a tax on the overage—varies from fifth to twelfth. But not by that much. This year’s fifth-picking team, the Baltimore Orioles, had a bonus pool of $11.8M. This year’s twelfth-picking team, the Angels, had a bonus pool of $9.3M. This isn’t an exact projection of what the difference will be—things like compensatory and competitive balance picks shake it up—but it’s fair to expect the gap over the Cubs’ span of possible bonus pools to be about two or three million dollars, barring significant immediate change in the draft following CBA renegotiations this offseason. Between fifth and seventh, the gap is smaller—less than a million dollars. But overall, it’s a significant but not enormous two or three-million-dollar difference.
It’s important not to misrepresent this number. This is just the difference in what the Cubs can pay their draft picks depending on where in the draft they pick. It’s not the difference in the value of the prospects they’ll select.
FanGraphs, in their Farm System rankings, has assigned a value to players at each Future Value (FV) based on prior performance of players graded at that value. A 70 FV position player, like Adley Rutschman in the Orioles’ system, is worth roughly $112M, by their calculations, on the open market right now. A 40+ FV pitcher, like Anderson Espinoza, the Cubs’ return in the Jake Marisnick trade, is worth roughly $3M by those same calculations.
Using these valuations and the FanGraphs evaluations of the first 110 picks in this summer’s draft, we get a plot of value over time in the draft that looks something like this:
Now, to be fair, this summer’s draft might not be perfectly representative of next summer’s. There may have been more talent than usual due to a pandemic-induced backlog. Still, it can’t be too far off, and the general takeaways remain the same: The draft is front-heavy, and the difference in value round-to-round shrinks under one million dollars by the third round. We can even assign an equation to this value—that black trendline sliding on through the choppier orange line.
That trendline understates the value at the top of the draft. The first pick is worth more than $9.4M, which is what that trendline thinks of it. To correct this, let’s look at just the first round(-ish) for a second:
That’s more reasonable. In this dichotomy, the first pick is worth $16.3M. Is that the right number? Probably not. But it’s more likely to be in the ballpark.
I faded these trendlines into one another and added up the values of each team’s selections in a hypothetical world in which there are the same number of compensatory and competitive balance picks in the first three rounds as there were this year, but none of the teams in question got them. The gist of this is that I’m projecting just the value of teams’ first three selections, independent of their status as a competitive balance team or whether they happen to get a compensatory pick out of the free agency process this winter. The differences are large. Over the first three rounds, the team that selects first can, independently of competitive balance and compensatory selections, expect to add $20.8M in prospect value. The team that selects twelfth, on the other hand, can expect to add just $11.1M. In the grand scheme of a franchise’s future, this isn’t enormous—$8M/WAR is a reasonable basic representation of the free agency calculus. But within the draft, it’s sizable. Drafting first is almost twice as valuable as drafting twelfth.
Of course, there are differences in the bonus pool. The Pirates, who selected first this year, had a bonus pool of $14.4M, and while a lot of that went to players selected beyond the third round, the majority of the difference between that and the Angels’ $9.3M number came from the first few selections. The Pirates might have been adding $10M more in value, but they were paying $5M more for it. Applying this math to Cubs’ potential draft slots, we get the following breakdown, using the 2021 numbers (which are flawed because of competitive balance, as we’ve been saying, but at least get us in the right ballpark). Remember: The prospect value is for the first three rounds, the slot value is for the first ten rounds, but the differences pick-to-pick get so small after the first few rounds in both that the right-hand column is still fairly representative in this very rough exercise:
| Pick | Prospect Value ($M) | Slot ($M) | Value ($M) |
| 5 | 16.5 | 11.8 | 4.6 |
| 6 | 15.5 | 11.4 | 4.2 |
| 7 | 14.7 | 11.3 | 3.4 |
| 8 | 13.9 | 10.9 | 3.0 |
| 9 | 13.1 | 10.5 | 2.6 |
| 10 | 12.4 | 10.1 | 2.3 |
| 11 | 11.7 | 10.0 | 1.8 |
| 12 | 11.1 | 9.3 | 1.8 |
Generally speaking, the Cubs gain maybe half a million dollars in value, then, for every draft spot they rise. This is…not that much. To be fair, there may be cutoffs in next year’s draft making these picks more valuable than their projected values by our trendlines. We may be understating the values within the top ten, or within the top seven, or within the top four. Maybe the Cubs will score twenty million more in value by picking fifth than they would by picking sixth. It’s impossible right now to know. There’s also no incentive for the Cubs to win, other than the one that says that if the Cubs win, they must have played better, and that must translate to better production from their returning players, so…losing might still be better than winning. As we’ve been saying, the optimal happening is for the Cubs to lose while returning players play well and Zach Davies stinks. But really, it’s unlikely to make much of a difference if the Cubs pick seventh or eighth. And it might not even make that much of a difference if they pick fifth or twelfth.
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The Diaspora:
Jon Lester had a great outing for the Cardinals, striking out five while only walking two as he pitched into the seventh inning, outdueling Luis Castillo in Cincinnati. Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant each went two for four with a double as their teams lost. Jorge Soler homered again. José Quintana is a Giant now. Not physically, though. Still the same height as before.
Around the Division:
The Reds’ wild card lead is down to half a game, and they’re even with the Padres in the loss column. The Cardinals are just two and a half back—one back in the loss column—and the Phillies are just three back—two back in the loss column. The Brewers have signed Renato Núñez to a minor league deal, adding a little emergency corner infield depth/a little corner infield lottery ticket as they keep trying to patch together their offense. The Pirates are calling Shelby Miller up from AAA—I believe he’ll pitch in the bullpen for them, but I could be wrong. I am neither a Pirates whisperer nor a Shelby Miller whisperer.
Up Next:
These two games in Minnesota.
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Whom:
Cubs vs. Minnesota
When:
7:10 PM Chicago Time
Where:
Target Field
Weather:
Temperatures in the seventies, wind blowing in at about five miles per hour.
Starting Pitchers:
Zach Davies vs. John Gant
The Opponent:
Gant, the Cardinals cast-off, hasn’t exactly dazzled in the Twin Cities. He’s got a 5.43 xERA and 4.82 FIP, with a 6.75 ERA since joining the Twins. That said, his FIP’s only 3.41 since joining the Twins. That also said, it’s only been sixteen innings, and he’s been better in relief than as a starter for them.
Overall, the Twins are still scuffling. Byron Buxton’s back, but they’re missing Mitch Garver and a slew of pitchers at the moment.
The Numbers:
The Cubs are +135 underdogs, with the Twins at -145 for a 40% implied Cubs win probability. The over/under’s at 9½ and leans towards the under.
Cubs News:
The Tennessee Smokies’ Covid outbreak continues—they’ve canceled two more games.
Cubs Thoughts:
I care a lot less about the draft order than I did when I started this post, but hey, again, maybe this is a twenty million dollar difference. On another note: With Javy Báez speculation swirling in the wake of the Mets organization (not just the fans) turning on him, put me on the list as thinking he’d be a good offseason addition. We have little reason to believe Nico Hoerner’s going to be spectacular, and the DH could create a spot for Nick Madrigal at times even if Hoerner really does end up being pretty good. Are there better players you could add, both in terms of quality and fit? Yes (see: Castellanos, Nick; Stroman, Marcus). But if you can get Báez cheap, get Báez cheap.
