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Last week, I started taking another look at how the Cardinals have done (historically) with draft-and-development. This is a journey more than end point and I have many more numbers to crunch. This week is an abbreviated update, since most of my time has been spent at Spring Training and sitting inside number crunching doesn’t seem like a thing to do right now. The pool calls. If you missed last week’s article, you can find it here.
I did a mash-up of ZIPS projections for 2026-2028 future seasons and Fangraphs fWAR results for seasons 2017-2025, but limited to players listed in the FanGraphs prospects boards, which ranks prospects dating back to 2017. That covers 9 seasons of “young guys”. With ZIPs doing most of the heavy lifting, I analyzed how ZIPs thinks teams have done with drafting (and developing?).
Interesting side note … I heard from Dan Szymborksi a few hours after my article published using the ZIPs projections. He kindly offered to provide some additional data he may have beyond what FG makes public. If I’m smart enough to figure out something, I will take him up on that.
Below, I’ve summarized, by team, all the fWAR that ZIPs thinks our list of prospects will have accumulated by the end of the 2028 season. I’ve added the perspective of showing (on the y-axis) how much teams have put out in signing bonuses for those prospects. Note the narrow range of spending, with a high of $56 million (over 9 years) to a low of $13 million. Peanuts compared to some of the FA contracts. The highs and low are effectively constrained by where teams draft and the international bonus pool limits. The teams at the low end of the spending (Dodgers, Astros, Yankees, Cardinals) are ones that typically draft low (by being good) or sign Free Agents regularly (losing draft choices and associated pool money). Or both. The teams that have more to spend (Cincy, Pittsburgh, Baltimore) are the opposite. They’ve been bad during the analysis period (drafting high, getting higher bonus pools) and generally avoiding the Free Agent market.
On the x-axis, you see a pretty wide spread of projected fWAR (through 2028). Washington and Miami trail the pack which the Cardinals lead. A quick observation is an oldie, but apparently a goodie. As noted in earlier work using different data sets, it is remarkable how consistently that poorly run teams both play and draft poorly and are unable to acquire much value through their much higher draft picks. As you look in the lower right quadrant, you see the same phenomenon occurs while studying 2017-2028 as occurred during the original study (2000-2019). Well run team, drafting lower, still draft better. Really, only San Diego has broken that mold. Tip of the cap to A.J. Preller. The Cardinals have now had two consecutive high draft picks. I am fascinated to see how that turns out.
The red and blue dashed lines divide the teams into 4 quadrants, with labels as shown. As surfaced with previous analyses using different data sets, the phenomenon continues to be that strong organizations do well on the field and still manage to acquire more measurable prospect talent than the other organizations. These are the ones shown in bottom right=hand quadrant – Low Investment, High Return. These are the organizations getting more fWAR for less dollars.
Which team is projected to derive the most fWAR value from the prospect ranks from 2017 through 2028? Your St. Louis Cardinals. Tops. Bar none. At 371 accumulated and projected fWAR, the Cardinals come out comfortably ahead of Atlanta at 354 accumulated and projected fWAR for their prospects. And the Cardinals were doing this under tighter constraints. Not self-imposed constraints like being cheap, but round/pick bonus constraints that come with drafting where they have typically drafted (except the last 2 years). As a side note, y-axis on this graph shows bonuses actually paid. I queried against pick value and almost all teams, all years have their paid bonuses fall within 5% of the pool allocated the by round/pick values assigned.
Interesting.
Other observations
Let’s look around the league for other tidbits. How about those Padres. They appear to be drafting well. Their bonus spending is right on average, too. Their only drawback is most of those projected WAR are projected to occur with other teams like Washington (the Soto trade) and Oakland (the Miller trade).
I note the Pirates and Reds have spent comparatively heavily, by virtue of being bad for multiple, multiple years. If I peek at only projected WAR (ignoring any WAR actually accumulated 2017-2025), ZIPs appears to like Pittsburgh (157 future WAR) a lot better than Cincy (106 future WAR), but over the 9 seasons views them both as average drafters, albeit spending more to get to that average mark. For the curious, ZIPs sees the Cardinals future (projected) WAR as exceeding both those teams.
Milwaukee and Pittsburgh’s short-term outlooks looks pretty strong. They are local competition. The Cubs and Reds? Not so much. Details upon request.
Clouds on the horizon?
From the Cardinals viewpoint, one dark spot is that if you look ONLY at future performance expected (2026-2028), the Cardinals are more mid-pack, with Detroit, Baltimore, Tampa, San Francisco and Milwaukee in the top 20%. This could be viewed as worrisome, but it is a point-in-time look unpolluted by actual performance data that could prove to be highly variable even by mid-season 2026. Also, I don’t believe any of the Cardinals recent acquisitions (Cinjtje, Doyle, Rodriguez and others) have ZIPs projections yet. I bet they do by this time next year. Let’s hope they are good ones.
I would be remiss if I didn’t note that IF the Cardinal’s projected WAR improves next year, it will be a result of replenishing the farm system via trades as well as good drafting. Later, I will look more deeply, but I suspect that 2021-2023 were not good draft years, creating a bit of a donut hole that all these trades had to backfill.
I would note that the Cardinal’s did underspend their slot money over the 2017-2025 time period. By $2m on a $25m spend over the 9 years. The $25m is calculated at 105% of the slot values, since teams can go over-slot by 5% with negligible penalties. The underspend is nothing egregious. But I do wonder if a team like St. Louis that is so reliant on draft/sign and develop can afford to miss even that much. Back of the envelop math tells me if $23m can produce 371 fWAR, then $2m more could well have produced an added 35 fWAR. That’s not nothing.
One other interesting (to me) thing I see in the data. I know that the Giants grew impatient with their development-oriented leadership and switched over to Buster Posey. Zaidi was hired in 2019 and let go in 2024. Although the graph above shows the Giants running below average on draft/sign talent acquisition, the ZIPs projection data is much more friendly on the view of more recent draft classes and the Giants will likely trend more to the right over the next couple of years (unless they trade all those prospects). The data hints that the Giants may have been too hasty to abandon the track they were on. I note that Bloom is on a similar 5-year timeline. Makes me wonder if that might be too little.