HangTime wrote:IF you compared this to the NBA.
Is Nalammala the Swing for the fences pick like Bruno Caboclo (also the 20th pick).
Basically impossible to compare baseball and basketball in that regard. Every draftee, and in particular every high school draftee, comes with a much lower chance of having a substantive major league career than a player chosen at the same point in the NBA draft.
Only two-thirds of players drafted in the first round will ever play in MLB at all, and a much smaller percentage will have meaningful careers. To pick a year out of a hat, in 2010:
21 of the 30 players selected went on to play at least one game in the majors (I'm treating non-signers as part of this class for the sake of simplicity, they all got re-drafted).
14 of the 30, less than half, posted a positive bWAR (the absolute minimum threshold for "did something") for their major league careers/careers to date.
10 of the 30 played in more MLB games than Bruno played NBA games (105), despite that only being two-thirds of an MLB season worth of games.
8 of the 30 posted more bWAR than Cavan Biggio has to date (and Biggio is still much earlier in his career), which seems like a good threshold for "had some impact but I mean...".
5 of the 30 have posted more than 20 bWAR, which means a long, successful career of being good at baseball.
4 of the 30 (Harper, Machado, Chris Sale and Christian Yelich) will almost definitely get HOF votes, with Harper/Machado much more likely than not (Sale would be if not for health, but I don't think his peak overcomes the fact that he was basically done by age 29).
So, is Nimmala a swing for the fences pick? Yeah. Because after the top five, and even often in the top five, all picks are.
And that's a really good 1st round, in which more than half of the players were outright busts, and only about a quarter of them had any sort of sustained success.
Despite this, because of the really silly way that MLB structures its finances, the draft is still the singlemost important date in baseball, because even a modest hit on a draftee means tens of millions of dollars that you can allocate elsewhere on the roster.