Editor’s Note: Today’s analysis is brought to us in a guest post from Always the Jake “a Guardians Twitter account run by a fan just like you—if you were twice as irreverent and three times more reactionary while watching baseball.” Follow them at @AlwaystheJake. We thank them for their time and effort on this excellent piece!
The only problem with Travis Bazzana is your expectations
Last week while being broiled against my will by the hot sun and repulsed by the stench of my own B.O., I was so ticked
off I could barely answer the questions a customer service rep was asking me over the phone. My family and I were out on our first boondocking trip in our new RV, and thanks to a faulty generator and water pump, we had no air conditioning and no shower. I was livid. This is what I get for all the money I spent on this thing? At the risk of spoiling the ending to this story, I’m going to admit to you that I was being unreasonable. Turns out, my anger was the result of irresponsible expectations that I had set for myself haphazardly. I’ll explain more about that later on, but let’s be real: you came here for baseball opinions, and it would be pretty embarrassing for me to lose your attention because I rambled about a camping trip for too long. So let’s talk about how this relates to Travis Bazzana. What should a reasonable fan expect from a #1 overall pick? To be fair, the Guardians franchise has never picked first overall in the draft, so maybe we should offer some grace to fans who genuinely just never knew what to expect. That said, I feel obligated to point out that a large fraction of the fan base appears to have set expectations for themselves that were, much like my expectations as a first-time RV owner, pretty unreasonable. Let’s talk about some of those expectations: Unreasonable Expectation #1: The first overall pick should turn out to be the best player from that draft. This is rare. In fact, it almost never happens. Assuming the image below is accurate (h/t: the Reddit user at this link), I can’t find a single instance in the past twenty-five years in which the player taken number one overall had the consensus best career of everyone in his draft class.
Even for some of the biggest success stories on this list, at least one player picked later had a more productive career. Take Gerrit Cole, for instance. Francisco Lindor has put up 14 more fWAR and was taken seven picks later. Bryce Harper? Great career. Chris Sale’s has been slightly better, and he was taken 12 picks later. David Price? Nah, Freddie Freeman will end up with almost twice as much career fWAR and wasn’t picked until the second round.
If you’re still not convinced, consider that Stephen Strasburg was seen as a generational pitching talent and was the consensus number one overall draft prospect in 2009. By 2012, the Nationals (and nearly two dozen other teams) were no doubt kicking themselves for not taking Mike Trout, who remained on the board until pick 25.
Ready for the crazy part? Drafting the best player isn’t even necessarily the goal for an MLB team. A smart club’s goal is simply to get good value relative to where they’re picking. That means weighing each player’s ceiling, floor, injury risk, signability, character, and ten thousand other factors before making a selection.
The player drafted #1 overall never ends up being the best in his class. More realistically, a first overall pick who isn’t a total bust usually ends up posting at least 30 fWAR across his career. If you didn’t know this when you set your expectations, that’s okay. I didn’t know that first-time RV owners usually camp in their driveway for a few nights to test out the systems before taking it on its maiden voyage. We all learn the hard way sometimes.
Reasonable Expectation #1: The first overall pick should ideally be a successful major leaguer who produces at least 30 fWAR during his career.
Unreasonable Expectation #2: The GM should be fired if the #1 overall pick doesn’t pan out as expected.
No matter how good scouts are, or how modern an organization’s analytics department might be, nobody can predict the future. Case in point, nearly 40% of all #1 overall picks end up producing less than 3 fWAR during their entire career—in layman’s terms, they end up being busts.
If you’re expecting anyone to get fired over a draft slot that’s got nearly a 50/50 shot to bust, you’re going to be disappointed. But rather than go any deeper down that path, let’s take one big step back into the world of rational behavior for a second and acknowledge something: if you’re already putting Travis Bazzana in “bust” territory, you’re trying to be miserable.
While I’m writing this, Bazzana currently owns a .287/.422/.511 batting line in AAA while walking nearly as often as he strikes out. He hit a 110 MPH laser over the right field fence last week. Most importantly, he hasn’t even played a game in the big leagues yet. Turns out, tonight is his first! It seems like bare minimum due diligence to let him have a career before calling for the head of the GM who drafted him.
It’s unreasonable to call Bazzana a bust. And even if it somehow turns out that way down the road, nobody is losing their job over it. Number one overall picks bust all the time—much like new RV parts bust all the time. Turns out they’re made with light materials to reduce the vehicle’s weight, and are mass produced cheaply to make RVs affordable for people like me. That’s why they issue a warranty to replace faulty parts! Who knew?
Reasonable Expectation #2: It’s impossible to know whether any #1 overall pick will be a bust, and if he is, nobody will be fired over it because drafting is hard.
Unreasonable Expectation #3: A college hitter drafted first overall should be close to MLB ready.
A pro scout in the Rays organization once told me “the path to the big leagues is not a racetrack”. That simple phrase has lived rent free in my head for years. There’s no award for reaching MLB faster than your peers. Would you rather have Jackson Holliday, who debuted in April of 2024, or Roman Anthony, who was picked in the same draft class but debuted over a full year later?
The same applies to college players. The Royals promoted Jac Caglianone on June 3rd of last year, only to be the second-worst player in all of baseball that season (-1.6 fWAR). Sources tell Always the Jake that he still has not received his gold trophy for being first in his draft class to make his MLB debut. Fellow 2024 draftee Konnor Griffin has also struggled since being promoted earlier this year.
Skeptics will point to guys like Nick Kurtz, Chase Burns, and JJ Wetherholt, all of whom have had varying degrees of success as major leaguers. I will point to my butt and tell them to kiss it. I don’t care. I care about what Bazzana does during the 6-7 years that he wears a Cleveland Guardians uniform.
It’s a consensus among industry experts that making the jump from AAA to the majors is tougher for players than it’s ever been. Consider what that means for a player trying to get there from college baseball, and you’ll probably realize that the expectation of a “quick rise” from D1 to MLB is unreasonable. Not as unreasonable as my expectation that I could skip straight to a week of boondocking in a brand new RV, but unreasonable nonetheless.
Reasonable Expectation #3: A college hitter will reach the majors on his own timeline.
Unreasonable Expectation #4: A first overall pick’s development should be linear.
This one deserves the most emphasis because it trips up even some of the most avid and well-researched fans I’ve met. What worked for a kid in college is almost never going to work for him in the bigs. So young players fail, learn, make adjustments, and repeat that cycle about three dozen times before finally getting a chance to fail, learn, and make adjustments indefinitely at the MLB level.
Fans have more data available to them than ever before. That’s awesome, but it comes with a curse: they don’t always know how to interpret it rationally. Too often, fans will spot a hole in a prospect’s swing, a flaw in his contact profile, or struggles against a certain pitch type, and lunge for the panic button.
A few well-known Guardians fan accounts, run by people for whom I have a great deal of respect, have in recent weeks taken to Twitter to ring the alarm bells. Some of their tweets on Bazzana offer us proof of why high draft picks can be a trap even for some of the smarter people you know. Hitting the panic button is not a sound reaction to a top prospect adjusting to AAA pitching in the first two weeks of the season.
Then again, I didn’t have a sound reaction to the struggles of my last camping trip, either. So I definitely have no right to point fingers.
Reasonable Expectation #4: Even a first overall pick will have ups and downs as he makes adjustments to prepare for The Show.
Your expectations are more powerful than you realize.
I’m embarrassed to admit that last week I spent several hours of a beautiful vacation being irrationally angry about issues with my RV—issues that were apparently not uncommon and that were covered by the unit’s warranty.
But the shame of my silent tantrum dives even deeper. For nearly a decade, my wife and I have taken our son camping with a hand-me-down tent and some cheap foldout chairs. Even without water and electricity, our proud new family purchase was an upgrade over what we’d been able to afford in years past. We had gotten this great new vessel in which to create memories, at a great price, and all it needed was a few minor, common warranty claims. Why did I let myself waste moments of a precious experience with my family being angry when I should have spent it being grateful for what I had?
Anger is a product of unmet expectations. Happiness is a product of met or surpassed expectations. We as human beings have the power within us to set expectations, which means we have power over our own happiness. Cool, right?
Two years ago, the odds that the Cleveland Guardians would even get the first overall pick in 2024 were just 2%. Today, we have a top prospect debuting for oue team who is excited to play for our city, and who is likely to become a very, very good hitter.
I expect we’ll all have fun watching him play.
