MLB

Re-Drafting the 2007 MLB Draft Using Advanced Analytics

Josh Donaldson would undoubtedly climb up the order today. Which team should've drafted the 2015 AL MVP?

The modern-day MLB amateur draft is full of picks and spans the course of three days, which must be the reason it's not covered nearly as much as the NFL and NBA drafts are.

It's hard to keep track of everyone who gets selected throughout the years. Some play out their careers in the minors, others bounce back-and-forth and then there are a few who manage to rise quickly into big league roles (and sometimes superstars). For that reason, we rarely discuss how things have played out because situations differ from one another and can change quite rapidly.

Today is your lucky day, though, because we're here to look back at one of the more intriguing draft classes since the turn of the century.

We're going to first evaluate what happened in the draft and then re-sort to see what should have happened, taking note of the biggest busts and risers. We will be using FanGraphs' career wins above replacement (WAR) to do that. WAR, in case your unfamiliar, is calculated so that we may know how much better a player is than one that would replace them.

Over the last 10-plus seasons, each player drafted in June of 2007 has played in a certain numbers of games, enabling them to rack up a WAR over that time. This is more than enough of an opportunity to create an adequate sample size, so let's look back at how things might be different knowing what each player has accomplished to this point. We'll specifically be focusing on the top-10 picks and how they should change.