As expected, the O's used most of their second-day draft picks (rounds 19-50) on leftover college seniors, high schoolers, and junior-college prospects. In fact, after round 28 they exclusively took prep and juco players. Some quick, superficial numerical analysis:
- The Orioles' draft class of 49 picks comprised 26 pitchers and 23 position players.
- Twenty-one picks (43%) were from four-year colleges, eleven (22%) from junior colleges, and seventeen (35%) from high schools.
- The Birds' picks in rounds 1-25 were dominated by college players. Nineteen of those picks (79%) were from four-year colleges and just five (21%) were from high school.
- In the second half of the draft, though, the four-year college picks dwindled to just two (8%), while the juco tally soared to eleven (44%) and preps to sixteen (48%).
- Eight catchers were picked, suggesting that the Orioles specifically sought more depth at backstop. Totals for other positions: one first baseman, two second basemen, one third baseman, three shortstops, and eight outfielders.
- The pitchers were almost evenly split in handedness between twelve lefties and fourteen righties.
- The states most heavily mined by the Orioles were California and Texas with six players each, followed by Florida with five and Illinois, Maryland, and South Carolina with four players apiece. One Puerto Rican high schooler was taken in the 44th round, but all the others came from U.S. institutions.
(Pitcher Derik Drewett, selected in the 36th round, is classified as a juco draftee in the totals above although his school, the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, is a four-year college. Drewett apparently is on an associate's degree program at UAFS, making him draft-eligible after his freshman year.)
From MLB.com: “O's draft 49 in marathon” (Gary Washburn)
In addition to the MLB.com draft tracker, Baseball America has the entire 2004 Oriole draft class conveniently listed on a single page.
Comments (2)
This comment has nothing to do with the draft choices made by the O's but rather with their "Ace". I respect your opinions and enjoy reading your articles and was wondering what your sentiments regarding Sir Sidney. After Tuesday's matchup against the Big Unit, I read several articles comparing Johnson to Ponson, as to the fact that Johnson struggeled early in his career as well. What do you make of this? Do you think Sidney will ever have the potential to be the ace of any team? His only winning season out of six seasons was last year when he was coming up on free agency.
It seems like Ponson wants the role of the third or fourth starter on a team, and to make a couple million each year. It doesn't seem like he cares about conditioning and has an overal immature attitude towards the team. What can the O's do with this guy besides watch him struggle?!?
Keep on writing as frequent as you can; I really enjoy your alternative and in-depth articles!
Posted by Eric | June 11, 2004 2:01 PM
Posted on June 11, 2004 14:01
I was starting to wonder if anyone was bothering to slog through those long-winded dissertations that are my articles. Believe me, I want to write as often as I can, but I am limited by time and other interests. (Yes, there are other interesting things out there besides the Orioles.)
I also think it's important to present a distinct perspective that complements mainstream news sources, which are often bland and repetitive and too, well, mainstream to include the kind of detailed analysis that I prefer.
To perform such analysis, however, is no trivial task. In the tradition of rational discourse, whenever possible I try to use hard evidence to generate the observations and inferences in my writing. This requires compiling information and assessing it for interesting or important trends. If I find something statistical that catches my eye, then I may find it necessary to construct a table or a graph to represent the relevant data in digestible form. And then there's the artful matter of finding the right words to contextualize the data.
So nearly every blog entry of mine ends up like a miniature research report. (In some cases they are not so miniature.) While I enjoy doing it, I can understand if the mainstream media have little time to produce this stuff—their jobs are quite demanding already. I let them handle all the basic, day-to-day things like game coverage and interviews and transaction news. Meanwhile, I focus on the analytical side of things and whatever else catches my eye as a baseball fan.
Regarding Sir Pound-son—I still have a few unfinished stories in the pipeline, but I'll see if I can opine on our Round Mound of ...er, the Pitcher's Mound before the weekend is out. Thanks for the feedback. I agree that there is a need to further explore Ponson's recent performance and his future, since it looks like the Orioles are stuck with him until 2006.
P.S. In the draft recaps, I neglected to include a link to the Orioles Hangout draft page, which has probably the most complete information currently compiled on the Orioles' 2004 draftees. (Yes, even more complete than this site, at least for now.) A devoted fan there has collected stats, bios, and links to school pages for many draftees. It's a fine resource if you want to dig deeper into the Orioles' draft.
Posted by tbw | June 12, 2004 7:35 AM
Posted on June 12, 2004 07:35