Every June, Major League Baseball holds its first-year-player draft, the principle way that amateur players enter the MLB system. Teams are allowed a certain number of picks, selecting players in an order determined by the previous year’s record; picks can be traded between teams to change this order. I became curious about how geography influences the draft. Do different teams focus on different regions, and does this change over time? Have the primary sources for players changed over time? Does this affect the quality of the results?
In 2014, The Hardball Times published an in-depth analysis of Geographic Biases in the MLB Draft, which focused on the regional valuation of players:
The variable we will key in on is the difference between the percent share of players drafted and the percent share of major leaguers.