Meyer: Geographic bias in the amateur draft

From SABR member Daniel Meyer at Beyond the Box Score on March 30, 2015:

Last week I recapped the first portion of my SABR presentation on geographic bias in the amateur draft. I gave three possible reasons for the observed bias: behavioral, geographic/cultural, and structural. However my extended research for the SABR conference has lead to a possible fourth reason for a bias, scouting. Every team knows where the most players come from, but do their alignments of area scouts reflect this?

My research showed that high school hitters from baseball power states seemed to not be drafted as efficiently as they could be. It also showed the high school pitchers from power states were significantly better investments than high school pitchers from northern states.

For the original post at The Hardball Times, Alex Smith and I georeferenced the towns of all the players in our sample. To see if teams were proportionally scouting the baseball rich areas we also scraped the locations of about 500 area scouts as listed in Baseball America’s scouting directory. We presented the information in this simple map.

Read the full article here: http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2015/3/30/8309673/geographic-bias-in-the-amateur-draft-part-2-2



Originally published: March 30, 2015. Last Updated: March 30, 2015.