Higher floor does not have to mean lower ceiling.

Lance Lynn is a good example…but so is Jess Todd. It seems we are assuming these guys have no high ceiling ability.

It’s important to have reasonable expectations. The expected return on someone drafted after the top 10 or so isn’t all that high. A quick check suggests that over the life of the draft, only 10% of the guys drafted into the slots from 40th overall to 50th amassed major-league careers amounting to 5 WAR or greater. The fraction for slots 30 to 40 is higher, but not by much. (So, slightly, is the fraction for 50 to 60, curiously.) It’s just very hard to find guys that late in the draft who have high ceilings and reach those ceilings, and the “high ceilings” don’t have to be all that high for the statement to be true.

On the other hand, a guy who accumulates 2 WAR over a five-year career can still help a team for those five years. Open question: who’s more likely to reach that more modest “career” level, a high-ceiling guy or one who starts with polish and moves fast?

I agree that that cards went the safer approach, but things changed under Lunhow. I think with Lunhow, the cards were more confident in investing in the higher ceiling guys (Miller, Jenkins) much more than they were at the end of Jocketty’s term which produced disspointing results with high ceiling guys.

It will be interesting to see what happens going forward.

Also, you can’t site Kozma/Porecello as the rule. That was more of an admonality under Lunhow than the ruel. For one, the 2007 draft was generally considered (before and after) to be a bad draft year. And I beleive the cards infested heavily in the International market that year. So “going safe and cheap” might have been the prudent move that year. Looking back, the cards really didn’t miss anybody. People like to point out how dissapointing Kozma has been. That is great, but everyone else drafted after him has been dissapointing as well.

Also, Porcello was not a signing issue. It was a roster management issue. The kid wanted (and got) placement on the ML roster. It’s never a smart move to put a 18 year old pitcher on an ML roster.

2007 was just too unuasual to draw too many conclusions.

I agree that that college players late in the 1st round do not have high ceiling talent. But you act as if that has no value. These Bullpen guys and 4th starters, utility guys, 4th outfield do have alot of value and often suprise on their ability.

Nobody is saying always go conservative. We are saying a balance.

If they’d succeeded in locking up AP last year, there definitely would have been impacts on the 2011 draft. They’d have been much better positioned to look for “polished” players to provide upgrades on Schumaker, Westbrook, etc., and furthermore, would have had a financial need to do so, which is really the point. That wasn’t because of what the 2012 roster would look like; it was because Pujols would still be around in 2014, when the draftees arrive. And he would have been hideously expensive, driving a need for cheap young talent at the other positions.

I’m pretty sure, from what I’ve read in some places, that Mo had a suspicion already by draft time that they weren’t going to be able to keep Pujols. That made the need for high-ceiling guys all the greater. They drafted accordingly, with the caveat that there weren’t any REALLY high-ceiling guys left on the board by the time they picked.

If it was because he played second instead of short, I think the fact he spent his first 2 years in the same infield with Greg Garcia explains that.

If your point is that a player that advanced isn’t usually available at #19, I think we all agree that the 2011 draft was exceptionally deep. That’s how we got a first-round-quality player like Tilson in the second round.

Also, during the MV3 era, the drafting was affected by the organizational tendency to pick safe prospects who were “signable,” which helped lead to the decision to draft Kozma over Porcello with the 18th overall pick. Such a philosophy, along with the tendency to trade prospects for contributors, led to a quick and steep decline of the Cardinals system. When you draft safe and cheap prospects all the time, you’re going to wind up with a lot of depth that’s not capable of playing in the majors, which is exactly what happened.

Also, polished players with very high probabilities to make the majors also aren’t usually available in the 22-30 slot, Kolten Wong notwithstanding (who’s draft position had a lot to do with the fact that he had mostly been a utility player without a strong-enough position until his most recent season).

However, I disagree with the second paragrapth.

Your current major league roster really has no impact on the draft. A draft isn’t instantanious. It takes years to develop. Its impossible to see what the potential is needed 4 years down the road.

Part of the decision as to where to strike the balance, in all likelihood, has to do with the current and projected state of the major-league roster. When the roster has something like the “MV3″ of the mid-aughts, you may want to stress safe picks more heavily, since you don’t have to gamble as much, and you want to maximize the number of cheap contributors so you can afford to keep Pujols, Rolen and Edmonds or their equivalents around. With a more balanced roster, rolling the dice on high-ceiling prospects in the hopes of finding the next Pujols makes more sense, since you need such a guy and you don’t have to look for adequate-but-cheap talent at most positions to keep the budget balanced.

Going forward from here, the Cardinals seem to be more in that second situation, although the presence of Holliday and Carpenter amounts to about two thirds of an MV3 roster. It therefore seems prudent to go more aggressively after high-ceiling toolsheds, as Our Man Dan says he wants to do, than if three expensive superstars were still around. I still wouldn’t want that to be the only thing recruited, however; too much chance of not getting anything at all. High-ceiling guys with very high probabilities of making the majors aren’t available to be drafted in the 22 slot; they’ll go in the top five, long before the Cardinals can draft them. The price of success?