No big news flash. It's been a bit of a problem. Matthew Namee over at THT had an article the other day looking at how teams would look if they'd kept all of their home grown players.

link

The Sox team he came up with is:



Putting aside the overall quality of the team - actually not so bad, though I'd say including Matsuzaka is a bit of a cheat - the first thing that jumps out is that the corners - carcass Nomar, Lowrie, Murphy and Youk - are pretty lousy. You could also make this a thread about how awful the Sox have been at developing OF which necessitated the move of Youk to LF, but let's stick the power theme in general.

I did a quick look back through my draft data from 1987 onward just looking for corner players and traditional power bats. The Sox had a rediculsouly good power draft in 1989 picking Bagwell (let's skip over Larry Anderson) and Mo Vaughn. That's a hell of a lot of traditonal corner power. It's nearly 20 years ago, of course, but let's start the drought at the nice round number of 1990.

Since 1990 the Sox top corner bats produced have been:

1993 - Trot Nixon (mostly a platoon guy, and a bit of short career, but 3 really good years, and DIRT DOG!)
1996 - Shea Hillenbrand (that's 2 time All Star Shea Hillenbrand)
2001 - Kevin Youkilis (real good player, but mostly a <20 HR player before this year)
2003 - David Murphy (decent enough this year, but still a likely tweener, 4th of type)

And really up through the very good 2005 draft, that's about it. Now they've draft and developed some good pitchers and up the middle players who can be even more valuable than traditional corner power players, but man that stinks for 16 drafts.

If you forget the position constraint and ask how many drafted players in that peroid ever hit at least 30 HRs in a season - a pretty modest benchmark in the so-called steroid era - the answer is one. Nomar hit 30+ HR in his first two seasons. Nixon topped out at 28. Youkilis who entered this year with a career high of 16 came close with 29 in what may be his career year.

I don't really have the time or inclination to check other teams to put that in context, but 16 draft producing two 30+ HR seasons seems pretty low. And it's not like there are a ton of high 20 HR totals that just missed - one for Youk, two for Nixon and two more for Nomar. So that would be seven 25+ HR seasons and even without checking that seems terrible.

The Sox, through the end of the Gorman days, all of Duke and the early Epstein days, just really struggled to produce power hitters.

Oh, I should include Hanley Ramirez in here too though. He has a 29 and 33 HR season and god knows how many more.

I vaguley recall that in August 2005 (might have been 2006) that the HR output of the team outside of Ramirez and Ortiz just collapsed. And we started talking a little bit about well, one of these days the Sox are going to have find some power production to replace those two guys. To their credit, they won another WS anyway and still have a very good team 4 years later, but it sure looks like that search really, really needs to intensify.

This track record of futility is also going to make it really hard for people to even think about trading 2006 draftee Lars Anderson. He is without a doubt the best Sox power prospect since Bagwell/Vaughn from the 1989 draft class.

Oh, and that Namee article had a couple of other interesting things. Namee was Bill James assistent covering the first couple of years James was with the Sox. Back then it was fairly common for their to be posts and threads wondering what the hell James was up to. Much less so now that the Sox have had a whole of actual tangible accomplishments. Funny how that works out.

But Namee did mention a couple of players from that time that James recommended.



Yeah, I'm mostly including that to make the Varitek haters even crazier. Imagine a Shoppach/Navarro platoon for the next 5-6 years! And no, the Sox couldn't have gotten him from the Yankees, but he did move around. Would have been nice in retrospect to have topped that Mark Hendrickson offer from Tampa and picked him up from the Dodgers.

And the other guy mentioned is Casey Blake:



And actually that's more a good reminder that knowing the "right" players to target isn't always enough. Not everybody wants to be stashed away as your insurance policy.

And what would the Sox have done with Blake - trade him for top catching prospect Christian Santana? Eh, who needs that.

Interesting stuff as always, Philly.

One lineup adjustment I'd make would be to put Eckstein on the bench, Lowrie at SS, Youk at 3B and Brandon Moss in LF - seems like since Moss is not even on the bench it's an unintentional omission by Namee. Let's hope Anderson, Reddick, Almanzar and Kalish can help reverse this lack of power - it's arguable that Youkilis has already gone part of the way in doing so himself.

Okay, that's not a lot of power development but is that anomalous? How many teams are developing more?

This isn't exactly the same kind of analysis, but I took the top 20 HR hitters from each league and looked at which team drafted them. For players that were not drafted (or I couldn't find who drafted them very easily) I put the team they first played in the majors for. For players that switched leagues, I included them if they were above the bottom threshold (23 HR, Manny, Teixeira, Bay, Nady). I used only current franchise names.




Based solely on 2008 data, the Red Sox seem to be very middle of the pack, if not slightly above average, in recognizing top power hitters.

Yeah, it may very well be that the Sox are in a big broad average range. Certainly not good, but not so far from everybody else. I don't feel like looking through every team.

But the two things that stand out about the Sox power hitters mentioned are that their successes have tended not to be persistent (ie Nomar was great his 1st 2 years and sporadic thereafter, Nixon really only had the 3 decent years, Youk's power may yet persist but next year he'll be 30 with one season over 16 HR) and their biggest successes (Nomar and Hanley) were non-traditional SS.

That last one obviously isn't a bad thing. The first one is though and to some extent Hanley's blossoming only after leaving the organization is kind of another example of the lack of permanence in the few power hitters the Sox have produced. He's probably going to hit HRs for a long time, but the effect of those HRs on the Sox isn't all that meaningful.

You look at many of the names on the table above - Howard, Dunn, Delgado, (not Ludwick), Bruan, Pujols, Ramirez, etc - and they were (or will be) for a solid period of time iconic middle of the order sluggers for the team that drafted them. Youkilis and Hanley Ramirez are not that.

Something to consider is that the Sox have been (I would assume) drafting mostly to fill needs for the past several years, being a championship-caliber club. So perhaps drafting and developing power hasn't been as high a priority as drafting and devoloping speed and defense, considering what the lineup looked like from say 2003-2007. Now that that generation of draftees has started to make their way up, and with Manny gone, Ortiz and Lowell aging, etc. it will be interesting to see if there's a slight shift in draft-day priorities over the next year or two.

The thing I've noticed these past three years is that they're drafting more high ceiling guys than usual. Guys like Place, Kelly, Westmoreland, etc. They can afford to take risks on these guys because 1) they have the money and 2) there's no immediate need at the ML level like other clubs have. I do think one reason for not drafting power bats is because the organization has preached plate discipline more than anything. Now, rarely do you see guys with plus power potential and great plate discipline make it past the first 15 picks, so that creates sort of a problem for a team like the Red Sox. Another reason for not drafting guys who only hit the long ball could be that McLeod & Co. like guys who are "baseball players". This ties back into assuming the organizational method of plate discipline. A hitter who gets up there looking to hit a home run obviously doesn't have a sound approach and IMO, isn't one who McLeod particularly likes.

However, it would be unfair to say they haven't drafted any plus power potential hitters. They just haven't signed them.

2005: Alvarez, Dykstra
2006: LaPorta
2007: Morris, Matthews
2008: Oropesa

Another thing to consider is the relatively low draft position the Sox have had since 1990:

1-5: 0
6-10: 1
11-15: 3
16-20: 7
21-25: 4
26-30: 4

Of the 28 players who hit 30+ HR this season, 10 of them were top-15 draft picks: Braun, Manny, Gonzalez, A-Rod, Fielder, Burrell*, Utley*, Hamilton, Teixeira*, and Pena (* - originally drafted in a later round, but didn't sign until re-drafted first round). Add in to the 23+ list Glaus*, Longoria, Berkman (16th), Swisher (16th), plus players like Chipper Jones, Bonds, Griffey, BJ Upton, and there's a simple assumption missing here... a good number of elite power hitters are drafted in the first few picks, and simply have never been available for the Sox to draft.

Repeating what roundegotrip said, even more of these guys are still picked in the top-75 (David Wright, Carlos Quentin, etc.), and the Sox' draft philosophy in 2003-2005 towards top-75 draft picks was mostly geared towards getting guys who would be difference-makers in the majors quickly instead of high-upside guys. That at least explains the early Epstein era stuff away... not much of an excuse for the Duquette or late Gorman eras.

I have been stumping for this being a problem since sometime around 1999 (hey it's Rick Asadoorian!), but let me play Devil's Advocate for just a minute. I do think there are a few things in play here. One is that the Sox haven't really tried to develop power hitters. None of the top draft choices other than Nixon, unless you count Murphy, have been power guys. I think they feel in general and this is a philosophy shared by Duquette and Epstein, that you can find power bats in the veteran player market, so their drafts focus on up the middle players (particularly SS and CF) and pitchers.

It was noted that most big power bats come from the top of the first round, but let's look at all the players the Red Sox have drafted in the first round, including supplemental:



In the aggregate, the Red Sox have had 29 first round or supplemental draft choices since 1990. Of those, 16 were pitchers, 5 were middle infielders, 4 were CF, 1 was a C. So in the past 19 years the Sox have drafted exactly three guys for their bats - Trot Nixon, Aaron Fisher, and Matt Murton. 1 for 3 on these guys doesn't seem like that bad of a return. The problem here seems to be draft philosophy and not development. And Fisher and Murton I think represent what drafting in the supplemental round means - if you don't go well over slot, you are left with these tweener college OF who have some spark but not a lot of true merit. Fisher was a guy who would have gone top 10 if he had left after his junior (or maybe soph) year when he was better than JD Drew, but got injured and never got over it. Murton was ordinary but probably also the best pick available in the "let's try to fill up our minor leagues" vein, and of course he had a couple of ok but not great seasons.

Let's also look at how high the Sox went in the draft with their first real power bat. I apologize if I miss anything.



I think this list adds more credence to the thought that they just don't think the draft is the way to go to get these guys. I mean, if they signed their stretch picks all the time, they would have a surplus with LaPorta, Alvarez, Anderson, and Morris. In fact if they had gone after all of those guys I don't think many people would be worried about an impending TB dynasty. But I think the way they treat these guys is a pretty good indication of where they think money in the draft should be spent.

To throw in something, as I see it, especially from the draft chart above:

Another reason that power is not the predominant trait the Red Sox have been drafting for is that power is the most market-inefficient tool for draftees. A draftee with decent-to-great power potential is going to find himself higher up in the draft than players with similar (or possibly even greater other skills) except for power. And even if such a player slips due to signability, the contract demand may be relatively higher due to the sex-appeal of power potential.

This organization has seen evidence that power-hitting does not have to be the end-all-be-all of MLB success, and thus seems to have made a decision not to sacrifice overall talent for the sake of finding players with plus power

I actually wonder if we will see a change in drafting priority league-wide, if HR #'s continue to fall or reach a lower plateau. If power will be de-emphasized even further in team's draft strategy, in the way that the Red Sox appear to have been doing, then maybe the way lineup's are constructed change or we see "plus-power" only prospects fall significantly lower in the draft.

It seems to me that the Red Sox have considered pitchers as currency and the more prospects they have used as trade bait have done better than the ones they didn't trade. There was a while that LHPs were the pitching prospects of choice. The club has also gone through various periods where they were looking for a regular 2B, CF, and now an SS. I think some of their draft choices have been made to address those shortages and for all three of those positions, power was not at the top of the list. There was also a period, I believe, where the front office was sensitive to the criticism of the team as one that needed cabs to get to first when they didn't hit home runs, so they spent some of their draft choices on best athletes. Over the years, the club has not done particularly well with their first ten picks in drafts. They have also not spent their money wisely in many instances; they have made some excellent choices later in drafts (Teixeira is a good example) but then failed to sign them.