Sox vs. Mocks

Every year when the MLB draft rolls around, I casually notice whether the White Sox choose the the projected players assigned to them in the various mock drafts.  Whenever they do otherwise, I assume they must be foolish to value their actual choice so highly, contrary to the consensus.  After all, look at how few decent players they’ve drafted lately.

Having nothing else to do in January, I decided to run a very quick test of my belief that the White Sox would do better if they fired their amateur scouting department and took the best projected player available to them at their draft slot.   For simplicity’s sake, I ran through the stored mock drafts at mymlbdraft.com, and identified the highest ranked player still available to the Sox when they chose in the actual draft.  I then compared this hypothetical choice to their actual one.  I used data from 2007-2015, because those were available, and I figured anyone drafted after 2015 was still too young to evaluate.  (I’ve also included the 3 years that the Sox actually chose the highest ranked available player.)

To my surprise, the Sox actually did better than the mock draft projections:

Here’s who the mock drafts projected as the “best” available player the Sox could have chosen each year.  (They had no first round draft pick in 2011 because they signed Adam Dunn):

Here’s who the Sox actually chose:

So the Sox actually outperformed the mock drafts, but not by much, and only because of Tim Anderson.  (Anderson projected at #19, but the White Sox selected him at #17.)  Three times, they went with the conventional wisdom (Beckham, Sale & Rodon).  The mock drafts recommended 4 replacement level players whom the Sox rejected, but only so they could take someone equally forgettable.  At no point did the mock draft recommend a dramatically better player than the one the Sox took.

So I’ve decided to let the scouting department keep their jobs.  I’d be curious to re-run this analysis with full draft results, rather than just the first round choices, and to see if any other organization regularly does better.  But I don’t have THAT much time to waste, even in January.

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Of course I’m a masochist, and because you root for the White Sox you must be one too.  So for your nauseous pleasure, here’s my list of the best players, actually drafted in the first round, whom the Sox COULD have taken each year:

Kinda makes you want to cry, doesn’t it?

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