I don't really have anything to add to this, but it's my favorite thing today so I'm sharing:
6. The Rob Murphy Award For Out-of-Nowhere Relief WTFery
So you might know that I ran a relievers-only league with Effectively Wild listeners this year. There were 132 teams, in 12 draft pools of 11 teams, and we went 25 players deep—so, in other words, 275 players per league, and many more relievers than that actually picked. This was a league where Josh Zeid gets picked nine times. Somebody got desperate and picked Tracy McGrady. It was deep to the point of stupidity, is what I’m saying. And in all this ridiculousness, Ken Giles got picked once. Once! And he had the third-best ERA in baseball, with a FIP to match. Stupid relievers, stupid baseball, stupid baseball relievers.So here’s how we all missed Giles: He hadn’t pitched above High-A. His ERA there last year was over 6. He walked almost seven batters per nine, and had been prone to the longball, especially considering the lower home run rates of flame throwing relievers. He wasn’t a high draft pick. He isn’t tall. He isn’t even left-handed. How he got picked in even one of our draft pools, I’ll never know.
But it’s a fun reminder that, if we do a draft like this last year, a third of the guys we pick will be terrible. Like Kevin Siegrist. And a third, at least, won’t have been picked just one year earlier. Like Giles. — Sam Miller
By the way, that's just one piece of this Baseball Prospectus piece, good stuff all the way around. As for Giles, he's a great object lesson in why teams always have been, and always will be, enamored with young power pitchers, who so often seem just a mechanical adjustment away from being ridiculous.
