@AdamMcCalvy This organization needs pitching and then more pitching not another left fielder. Good grief.

— USMCforcerecon (@usmcforcerecon2) June 9, 2016

@Brewers @FutureIs_Bright @GoCards Hmm. You can never have enough pitching; pitching wins ball games, as they say…

— Greg Peck (@GazOpMatters) June 9, 2016

Oh, positional need, they cried from the rooftops! We need pitching, not more outfielders! Of course, the sort of folks who make such proclamations are more typically found calling into drive-time sports talk radio programs or in the comments section of an ESPN article, not reading an article on Baseball Prospectus, even one written by a silly fan who concocts wild conspiracies about dog mascots. However, there’s still something worth discussing when it comes how the draft fits into the Brewers rebuilding process and at the very least, I’ll give you something to link to when your less learned pals demand you cite your sources to disprove their wrong opinions. Here’s how Ray could become the Brewers staff ace of the future.

The obvious difference between the MLB draft and drafts in other major American professional sports is the lag time between being drafted and actually appearing on the major league team. NBA and NFL draftees typically make the team straight out of the draft, and first round picks are generally expected to take on major roles from day one. For this reason, drafting teams in those sports rightly consider level of talent and positional need. MLB draftees almost never appear in the big leagues right away. Since 1990, only 17 players have made their major league debut in the same year they were drafted – the last Brewer to do so was Rickie Weeks in 2003. The average position player has over 2000 plate appearances under his belt before making his major league debut, and the average pitcher has tossed nearly 400 innings. With an average gap of about four years between the draft and a player’s MLB debut, it’s silly to assume you can know what positions will be of need nearly half a decade in the future.

Of course a prospect’s value doesn’t lie only in how he can contribute directly the team effort on the field. Consider the 2007 Brewers, who spent their first round pick on first baseman Matt LaPorta. This, despite having Prince Fielder in the fold, who at 23 years old was already one of the best first basemen in the league. How foolish for a team seemingly on the edge of a long-awaited window of contention to use the seventh overall pick on a position at which they were already set long term! Of course LaPorta never played a game for the Brewers, and was instead the centerpiece of a trade that brought C.C. Sabathia to the Brewers just over a year later. LaPorta never quite worked out in Cleveland, so the bulk of his value to major league teams was not in his on-field contributions, but in the potential teams believed he had.

So Corey Ray may someday contribute to the major league team as a very good outfielder, which is presumably Plan A today. Or it could be Plan B, and he could contribute by being part of a trade that brings a major league player to Milwaukee that fills a need when the time comes. Or he could bust out and provide little to no value to the major league team at all, which we’ll call Plan E in honor of Eric Arnett. I don’t particularly like Plan E, but there’s something to be said for being prepared for all outcomes. Today, Ray is probably fifth or sixth on the organization’s long-term outfield depth chart behind Ryan Braun, Domingo Santana, Brett Phillips and Trent Clark. With Milwaukee’s next contention window and Ray’s MLB debut still over the horizon, however, there’s a lot that could change before we arrive at either.

Yes, the draft is an exciting time and there are a number of new and strange elements of the game we can learn about. For example, where are our favorite players drafted? We don’t often think about the draft on a geographical aspect, but it does play a serious factor. As research has shown, more players get drafted out of California, Texas, and Florida than most other regions.

I was, therefore, curious to see whether this was also true for the Brewers. Where do they make most of their draft picks? In order to answer this question, I gathered draft data from baseball-reference which has every state and every city that a player was drafted from. This includes all picks, even the players that didn’t sign with the team.

The Brewers aren’t a unique snowflake. Most of their players are drafted from California, Florida, and Texas.

Last year I also looked at a number of Brewers trends in the draft. Not only did I find that they were drafting more college players than usual, but I found that overwhelmingly, the Brewers were drafting more right-handed pitchers and that this selection was trending up. I, therefore, was interested to see if the Brewers prioritized a certain state for pitchers as oppose to position players. (This also contains some Canadian Provinces)

To put it bluntly, it doesn’t matter what state it is, the Brewers are more often than not going to pick starting pitchers. Of course, there are some exceptions, but most of them aren’t states where many players are drafted from. The only state where you could arguably make the case that the Brewers are targeting another position other than right-handed pitcher is Mississippi where more outfielders are drafted, but even then they’ve drafted 12 outfielders compared to 10 right handed pitchers.

It’s clear as night and day that the Brewers prioritize pitching in the draft. This may stem from the theory that pitchers are more volatile, and more prone to injury, therefore it’s better to have more of them. Most pitchers are also right-handed which is why you see more right handers than left handers. There’s also more pitchers generally on a major league roster. Usually, teams carry around 12 pitchers, which is obviously more than any other position. After all, at most teams will carry two catchers at the major league level.

But these results only give us a sense of the geographical demographic of the Brewers draft. I also looked at it by city to get a better idea.

This better demonstrates the geographical demographic. Mainly, the Brewers focus a lot more on the southeastern side of the country, while the northwestern side is basically ignored. I mean just look at Wyoming. Since 1969, 46 years of drafting players, the Brewers have never drafted a single player from that state, which is incredible. There’s a pretty clear emphasis of concentration in the southeast. The reason for it is probably because that’s where the better baseball schools are located.

The Brewers, however, aren’t all that different from the rest of the league. Daniel Meyer of Beyond the Box Score looked into the geographic bias in the amateur draft. Basically, he found that most players get drafted from the southeastern side of the United States, which is also similar to the Brewers. Meyer also analyzed where most teams were sending their scouts, and how they could send them more efficiently, “The map shows that the southeastern U.S., Houston area, and the outskirts of southern California appear to be relatively ‘under’ scouted. On the other hand, Dallas, Phoenix, northern California and several areas throughout the northern U.S. appear to be relatively ‘over’ scouted”. This doesn’t mean that the Brewers are allocating their scouts inefficiently. It just means that as a whole, baseball could do a better job. Now, obviously, some teams are probably better than others which is why more research may be needed in this department.

One of the more interesting data points of this map is the city of Honolulu, which generated the second-most drafted players for the Brewers. The city with the most is Miami. Hawaii as a state has only had 32 players drafted, and Honolulu accounts for 27 of them. Again, further research is needed, but considering the geographical locations of the MLB draft, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that Milwaukee is unique in that respect.

At the end of the day, this is just another reminder that the draft is a complicated and rich process. Even with all the new advancements in research and technology it still amazes me just how bad we truly are at getting it right. Maybe we will never get it right, and maybe we will. I don’t know, but the draft process, while being complicated, still remains one of the more interesting and multifaceted aspects of baseball.