This all started because I was messing around with some draft data that I gathered from a wonderful website, you’ve already, probably, most definitely heard of called Baseball Reference. In messing around with the data I created what is called a Sankey Diagram to visualize which schools Brewers draft picks came from in 2016.

A few things are clear, and a few things aren’t with this diagram. What isn’t clear is which schools generated the most draft picks for the Brewers. I’ll address that later because it’s not as important. Secondly, and more apparent, is that most of the Brewers draft picks in 2016 came from the Colleges/Universities. In fact, it’s not even close. In 2016 the Brewers drafted 29 players from Colleges compared to only nine from high school and three from Junior Colleges.

This was odd to me because, as Ben Lindbergh showed, high school players are once again on the rise in the major league draft, fighting a conception that teams are leaning more towards high school players nowadays.

I, therefore, looked at the whether this was a trend for the Brewers, or whether this was a one-year anomaly.

To some extent, I already knew this wasn’t a one-year trend because, for my very first piece on this site, I looked at this information. This time, all I have added is the 2016 information and the Junior College, plus the other, which are organizations where baseball reference did not specify the type. But, even looking at this information historically, 2016 stands out.

Since the Brewers became, well, the Brewers, the only season where more players were drafted from College was in 2010 when the Brewers drafted 31 players from Colleges.

For the most part, players from high schools are usually further away in their development then players who attend College. Most of those players are usually older, but they’ve played at a higher level, therefore they are more likely to reach the majors, and reach the majors quickly.

That doesn’t mean that the high school player isn’t necessarily the better pick. Many high school players are extremely talented and have high upsides, which is why we see more and more teams drafting them in recent years. But if a team needs to win now, they might want to go for a college player and hope that that player can help them in a year or two when they will still be competitive.

But, the Brewers aren’t in win now mode. As we all know too well, they’re going through a rebuild. They’ve traded away a bunch of assets for prospects in order to win in the future. Yet, they seem to be more prone than ever to draft College athletes.

A lot has been written on this website about a quicker rebuild. How the Brewers have a number of good players on the major league roster and how they could be competitive in the next few years. Maybe, the Brewers agree with that notion, which is why they’re drafting these college players. It could be a way to speed up the rebuild.

Or, this could simply be an organizational philosophy. That the Brewers believe that College players are simply a better bet than high school players. This could certainly be true, and is probably more likely than the latter argument. The trend has been going up for a while. Meaning that for a while now, the Brewers have been prioritizing College players over High School players, long before there was any idea of a rebuild.

This could also simply be circumstance. It’s possible that the best player that simply falls to them in the draft happened to be a College athlete. After all, many scouts lauded the Brewers first round pick this year of Corey Ray. I’ve written before about how important the first overall pick is, and the importance of getting it right. That means that it would be a mistake for the Brewers to pass up on a high school player, just because he is from high school. The Brewers should take the best available player, and from the buzz surrounding their draft, it seems that they did.

Rebuilding is often more complicated than what people make it out to be. There are many phases in rebuilds and all aspects of the game matter. Some matter more than most certainly. The Jonathan Lucroy trade was a very important moment, much more than the 1191st pick in the 40th round. But, overall strategy matters too. What are the Brewers doing and what aren’t they doing during this rebuild? What are their strategies? Are they going after certain types of players, and why? Understanding what they are doing will help us gain a better picture of their plan and what is to come.

Bonus:

Below are the schools where the Brewers draft the most players, in their team’s history. These are only the top 10.

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.