SPECULATOR: Avoiding this year's Jesus Aguilar

In most years, we might title this column something like "Searching for the next _______", looking for a set of indicators that could lead to the next breakout performance in 2020.

But on the heels of Ron Shandler's findings in his intro of the 2020 Baseball Forecaster, we'll take the complete opposite approach. Out of the 280 pages of fanalytic goodness in this year's tome, the chart that stood out most to me most showed us just how bad we are at picking players. Our success rates, grouped by every five rounds, from Page 3 are shown below:

To summarize: In the first five rounds of drafts over the last two years, nearly half of our picks have been full-on "busts" (player returned a 4+ round loss vs. his draft round), while another 25%...

Almost!

You’re just a few clicks away from accessing this feature and hundreds more throughout the year that have a singular goal in mind: Winning your league. Subscribe to BaseballHQ.com here!

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

More From Speculator

Baseball is back and we're here to overreact. We'll speculate on several Opening Weekend storylines.
Apr 2 2025 3:09am
Our annual Opening Day Eve exercise at category leaders who went outside the Top 200 this draft season.
Mar 26 2025 3:09am
They come from all stages of the draft. We'll use history as our guide to speculate on this season's Top 15 players.
Mar 19 2025 3:10am
Applying some of Flaherty's pre-breakout traits to this year's player pool.
Mar 12 2025 3:05am
We'll apply some lessons learned from last year's pool to speculate on this year's breakouts.
Mar 5 2025 3:09am

Tools