Published April 7, 2005 - Lansing State Journal By Jordan Bastian The Toronto Blue Jays' strategy for draft day is no secret. The formula has been on sale on bookshelves since May 2003. Toronto has steered away from drafting high school prospects with the raw, undeveloped talent that makes scouts drool in favor of more-experienced college athletes who can make the transition to professional baseball more smoothly. Lansing Lugnuts fans will get a chance to see the difference that this philosophy can make starting today - the first game for the Lugnuts as a low Class A affiliate of the Blue Jays. For the past six years, the Lugnuts had been affiliated with the Chicago Cubs, a team whose draft strategy often focused on high school and Latin athletes. "We're trying to get guys to the bigs as fast as we can," said Ken Joyce, the Lugnuts' new manager. "We look for players who have good strike-zone discipline ... guys that basically don't get themselves out. We're looking for players that are more polished." This approach sounds similar to the one detailed in Michael Lewis' best-selling book, "Moneyball," about Oakland general manager Billy Beane's recent success with the small-market Athletics. That could be because Toronto general manager J.P. Ricciardi came to the Blue Jays after serving as Beane's director of player personnel from 1997-2001. "J.P. was there, so everyone associates us with that," said Dick Scott, Toronto's director of player development. "People associate me with that and I wasn't even there." Scott said the reasoning behind drafting more college players stemmed more from past failures than from a strict "Moneyball" philosophy. "We took two high schoolers in the first 10 rounds of the 2002 draft and they are still struggling today," Scott said. "And in the same time, we have put three or four guys in the big leagues that we drafted out of college." During the 2004 draft, the Blue Jays selected five high-school prospects out of 52 picks. Compare that with Lansing's 2004 affiliate, the Cubs, who drafted 20 high schoolers out of 49 picks, and the difference in strategy becomes evident. So which is better? "There is this great debate," said Jim Callis, an executive editor at Baseball America. "But the research we've done from the '90s forward shows that there isn't a significant difference between high school or college guys when it comes to producing quality major league players." The Cubs' method of drafting high schoolers and signing a high number of young, untested Latin players - last year's Lugnuts roster had seven players of Latin descent compared with three this season - reflects this mentality. "We like to think that we take the best player available in every round," said Oneri Fleita, the Cubs director of player development. "We don't look at it as its a high school player, a college player or a junior college player. We just look at it as the best player at that time." The Cubs' system resulted in a Lugnuts-record 77 wins in 2004 and the Lugnuts made the Midwest League playoffs. But the batters also set franchise records for most strikeouts (1,060) and fewest walks (392) in a season. Those are numbers that the Blue Jays hope to avoid by filling their minor-league rosters with older, more experienced draft picks. This year's opening-day roster in Lansing has just two players drafted out of high school and 17 players selected out of colleges. "We needed some certainty in our draft," Scott said. "We thought the best way to fix it was with battle-tested guys." So, Lugnuts fans might not be treated to the popular "blue chip" prospects, as Callis referred to them, but what fans will see is a team built within a farm system that combined for the second-best winning percentage (.572) in baseball last year and a Class A level that has the sixth highest win total (704) from 2001-2004. "We're not reinventing the wheel here," Joyce said. "Moneyball is just a term they've given it now because of that book. We were doing it this way before that."
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