SPECULATOR: Avoiding this year's Jesus Aguilar

In most years, we might title this column something like "Searching for the next _______", looking for a set of indicators that could lead to the next breakout performance in 2020.

But on the heels of Ron Shandler's findings in his intro of the 2020 Baseball Forecaster, we'll take the complete opposite approach. Out of the 280 pages of fanalytic goodness in this year's tome, the chart that stood out most to me most showed us just how bad we are at picking players. Our success rates, grouped by every five rounds, from Page 3 are shown below:

To summarize: In the first five rounds of drafts over the last two years, nearly half of our picks have been full-on "busts" (player returned a 4+ round loss vs. his draft round), while another 25%...

Almost!

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