How well every MLB team has drafted

WASHINGTON — A lot goes into running the baseball operations department of a baseball club. Finding players, drafting or signing them, developing them, trading them, releasing them — all in all, trying to maximize the value of the talent available to you. It makes the question “is your team’s GM doing a good job?” an endlessly complex one to answer.

But what we can measure is how well teams have drafted talent, given the draft picks available to them.

That second part is crucial. Sure, the Nationals nabbed consensus top picks two straight years in Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper (2009-10), but they had the top overall pick due to how poorly the big league club had performed the years prior. With that in mind, we’ve attempted to measure how well each Major League club has drafted with the picks available to them since the Nationals moved to Washington, up through the 2012 draft.

When judging the success of these picks, we’ve taken their career accumulated WAR (per Baseball Reference) and divided it by an expected value. That expected value is derived from a chart of how much WAR players in the Baseball America Top 100 contributed, on average, over their next seven seasons. As a Top 100 ranking is essentially an updated draft ranking, this gives us an idea of how well players regarded and drafted so high actually compared with their baseline.

Many of these players made the majors with clubs other than the ones that they were drafted by, and a great majority of them played for multiple clubs. It would be near-impossible to try to calculate the value they’ve accumulated with each club through each and every trade. That is not the intent here. This is simply to see how the players the organization inked to contracts and initially invested in actually panned out as major leaguers.

So with no further ado, here are the rankings for each club, as well as the top three players in draft value.