How Red Sox draft strategy has affected the club's pitching

Just finished and came he to post. This was excellent, Ian!

For sure. Excellent article!!!

Great piece. Feel like the Red Sox approach to acquiring pitching is a perfect example of how the riskiest thing you can do is take no risk. In any dimension, whether it's the draft, the trade market or the free agent market - it's always going to make sense to prefer position players over pitchers. But if that's what you always do, you wind up with no pitching.

The Red Sox when they are at their best aren't afraid to make risky bets and I really feel like they've gotten away from that in recent years, in particular on the pitching side.

Definitely need to allocate more draft assets for pitching, but I hope they don't make the mistake of over-correcting here. Multiple years of sinking top 3 round assets into mostly pitchers would not be good in my opinion.

For sure, I'm not advocating to go completely 180 and to pull an Angels and draft all pitchers but after seeing the great breakdown in the article from Ian some sort of middle ground should be attainable I would hope. I'm no draft expert but the lack of any pitcher being drafted and given a bonus 1M+ over a 5 year span is pretty illuminating on why they may or may not have any SP prospects who project to be even mid rotation guys. Hard to explain that away as just the way things shook out during the drafts and would lead me to believe their whole strategy has been to avoid those types of pitchers in the draft. Which sure even if they had given multiple SPs bonuses that high it doesn't guarantee success at all but it's hard for me to sit here after seeing the #s broken down this way and think that this strategy has worked well for them.

Or they could actually treat some of these elite position players as assets and trade some for legit (i.e. #1/2 starter types), controllable pitching.

On a non-Red Sox note - I understand why the Pirates are #2 in total bonus money to drafted pitchers in the 2018-2023 timeframe in part because of Skenes and his 9 mil bonus… But, uh, what exactly did the Royals do to spend the most?

2018 the Royals picked Brady Singer 18th, Jackson Kowar 33 and Daniel Lynch 34, 2020 Asa Lacy #4 and 2021 Frank Mozzicato #7.

Lacy cost $6.67M, Mozzicato 3.55M which was underslot by a lot. Singer cost 4.25M, Kower was 2.15M, Lynch was 1.70M and also in 2020 they took Kris Bubic with pick 40 who cost $1.6M. I suppose looking at that would illustrate why it's not as easy as just drafting and signing higher bonus pitchers since I'm not sure the Royals are going to get a ton out of value out of those guys.

I agree with most of this. It's not always first rounder or the big bucks pulling in the pitching talent. In fact, Cleveland and LAD have been successful in rounds 3-5 consistently, and Tampa has been very successful acquiring undervalued guys - both inconsistent veteran and prospects - and sprinkling magic dust on them. I think the key is better scouting and pitcher development more than dollar asset allocation. These were supposed to be hallmarks of Chaim Bloom's skill set, but he had decidedly mixed results. Now Breslow and Bailey are the new Pitcher Whisperers™. We'll see.

Also, I think the hit on pitching development hasn't been "no home-grown starters" as much as it is "no homegrown starters who aren't 4/5s." That's been much more representative of the outcomes over the last 10+ years, with Bello, who's a 3 right now but still has a ton of development, being a distinct outlier. Crawford was right there for most last year, too, although both ZiPS and Steamer has him regressing significantly this year. I don't know enough about their models to know what that prediction is base on, but results will be seen on the field.

Either way, you've got two guys right now who are outliers from the last 10 years. The question will be can they improve, especially Bello who is just 24, to become consistent #2 types or better. But we'll need more, and more evidence that Breslow and Bailey offer a positive departure from the vast bulk of what we've seen from the last three regimes' pitching development.

Bloom had "mixed results" but the two "outliers" from the last 10 years have both emerged in the last year or two. Hmm...

That's one (or two!) cherry picked for you.

Now what do you say to people that cherry pick wishing the Sox had taken Bobby Miller (drafted #29) instead of Nick Yorke (#17)?

Ha, jokes on them. Miller already graduated and merely helps the Dodgers win actual MLB games and has nothing to do with balancing the system.