Gearing Up for the MLB Draft

Let’s break down the 71 first-rounders who have more than 40 career WAR.

Fun little list over at Baseball-Reference this week—they give us the 86 first-round picks in the baseball draft who have garnered more than 40 WAR over their careers. Now, they included 11 secondary-phase draft picks, which I don’t think quite fit into what we’re talking about.

They also include four so-called “sandwich” picks—the compensatory picks between the first and second round that teams get when they lose free agents. I have all kinds of problems with the whole idea of compensatory picks that we can talk about later, if you want. But beyond that, we’re not really talking about those guys, either. Aaron Judge was technically a first-round pick, but he was taken 32nd overall, so he’s not a first-round pick in my book.

Heck, Josh Donaldson was technically a first-round pick at No. 48.

Ridiculous.

Anyway, we’re not talking about those guys. We’re talking about the 71 true first-rounders who have more than 40 WAR over their careers. So let’s break those down in celebration of the MLB draft, the 60th edition of which begins on Sunday, and in celebration of this week’s PosCast, where Mike and I grumble some about the draft and how it should be so much more exciting than it is.

1st Overall Pick

• Gerrit Cole, Pirates. He was a first-round pick of the Yankees out of high school but didn’t sign.

• Carlos Correa, Astros. A lot of people were pretty surprised when the Astros took Correa. He was certainly supposed to go top-five, but scouts were all abuzz about a high school star in Georgia named