Does the College World Series Matter?

A few observations emerge from the above table of the top-100 earners all-time in MLB (as of Jul2023).

Quantity Comparable - Whether the player came directly from high school or elected to go to college first, there is no considerable difference in quantity. 39% of the top-100 earners came directly from high school. 35% went to college first.
Career Length Flat – Go directly from high school and you’ll get four more years in your earning career compared to those that go to college first, right? The top-100 show otherwise. Via either route, the average career length (last year played – draft year) is 19 years. (For players who are still active, I omitted them to prevent the career length from artificially shrinking.)
Earnings +8% - I won’t pretend like $14.7m doesn’t matter ($192.8m - $178.1m), but let’s also acknowledge that the difference is 8% over 19 years, not 20%.

Conclusion: Neither career length nor career earnings potential appears to be significantly impacted by choosing the college or high school route. The above numbers seem to suggest if a player can play, he’ll earn and play nearly 20 years.

The second is current MLB spend distribution across the three sources. I leveraged Spotrac’s MLB contract values (as of Jul 2023) and cross-referenced with my source data by player. I look at the distribution as an analog of a roulette or craps table. Where are MLB franchises putting their money? Here is the current distribution of 2023 Adjusted Salaries.

Does the College World Series Matter?
Club and Prospect Decisions on High School Signing or College
Saturday, August 20, 2023

By Joe Landers

Does the college World Series matter? I found myself asking this question this spring. There’s so much intrigue from the conference championships to regionals to the super regionals and on to Omaha. It’s compelling theater. Does any of it really matter? I did not know the answer, so I looked, and looked, and looked. I sought real empirical data. I thought there may be a decent chance that while this is interesting and fun, in the grand scheme of Major League Baseball and GMs, these players, teams, and the whole affair are just a blip on the radar. The real talent comes from High School and Latin America, right? College might have fun talent, bats that are way too live for their strength, pitchers that throw 160 pitches in a game, and really fun games. But relevant? I was dubious. Maybe I’m terrible at asking Google questions and using my resources on the internet. Either way, I found no such studies that satisfied my curiosity. Off I went collecting and compiling data.

First, I started with challenging the premise that college is unnecessary for great high schoolers. Conventional wisdom says that if you are a high school player and you get drafted by an MLB franchise, you take that deal and run with it because the faster you can get past your arbitration years, the faster you can get to earning real money in your chosen profession - Baseball. In considering that conventional wisdom, I wondered how well high schoolers are able to adapt to pro ball. I’ve heard stories, but what does the data show? Can I go from high school competition to AA, AAA ,or Big League competition within 12 months? Forget 12 months, how many are able to be productive and competitive within 3 years? Is the level of competition in college baseball high enough to prepare me to make that jump more quickly?

I wasn’t so sure that it’s better for high school players to sign on the dotted line after getting drafted and to go directly into a major league system. By the same token, I wasn’t so sure if college coaches, selling the benefit of the college experience and growth and development within their program, are on point either. Agents, college coaches, and MLB scouts and GM’s, none of them are 100% in the corner of the prospective player - the prospect who must make the jump. Whether the jump is from high school to the ACC, high school to AA, AAA, or the Bigs, or from college to the Bigs. There may be a few, there may be some who are truly looking out for the prospect’s best interest. I’m after empirical data for both sides – franchises and prospects. Is one route objectively better than the other? My hypothesis going into it was that the College vs MLB contract decision is extremely subjective and not nearly as binary as conventional wisdom would suggest.

Does the data show that I’m more productive if I take four years to develop and nurture my talent in college? Do I make more money, in my career, on average, if I go directly from high school to the Bigs? Does my career arc alter significantly if I choose to join an MLB system as soon as possible? The facilities, coaching, and training staff at High-A Schenectady (fictional, yes) is invariably better than the Wisconsin State apparatus (again, fictional). That’s what agents, scouts, and GMs will proclaim, but is it true? If I’m a major league franchise or GM, where do I have my highest success rate? Drafting players out of college? Drafting players out of high school? Signing players internationally who, by the way, I can sign for 11 months out of the year at any point that I choose between January 15 and December 15?

The questions kept coming. Considering the wild west that is the 11-month International Signing period, why not just throw an inordinate amount of resources at the international pool? If international is the best place to go for talent, what country? Is there an age that is most successful for signing players? Is there a position, is there a position by country? Is there an age by country? If high school is most lucrative, are there some states better than others at producing high school prospects? Is there a position that is most successful drafting out of high school? Is there a higher success rate by college, high school, international, by round in the draft, by position? Where am I most likely, and least likely to find success?

Exhausting, right? All of these questions spawned from that original question that I found myself asking while watching post-season college baseball in 2023: Does the College World Series even matter? I never would’ve thought that that one question would spawn so many derivatives that led me to build out a table of 6,202 players, a second of 8,343 retired players, and several spinoffs. Despite my best intentions, I may not find satisfactory answers to each of the above questions in 2023. There will invariably be more threads to pull on and rabbit holes to dive into. What follows is a collection of my conclusions to the question of CWS relevance and the corollary HS vs College decision.

HS MLB Contract Versus College

I considered two relatively straightforward ways to objectively assess whether prospects quantitatively have earned more going straight to an MLB contract out of high school versus playing college baseball.

The first is Career Earnings. I’ve seen many career earnings tables. They’re not hard to come by. I’ve found none that readily include what I call the player’s “Source”: High School, College, or International. Baseball-Reference.com’s Top-100 is the one I elected to use as a starting point. I simply took the time to verify the player’s source and came up with the below table.

What's next?

On Deck: Lead Time by HS, College, and International. Team-controlled contract length isn’t hard and fast, but it is finite. Is there a considerable variance in how long it takes for the three sources to make it to the Bigs? Is Lead Time more impacted by Time in MLB system or by Age?

In the Hole: Assessing productivity by source: HS, College, and Int’l.

Further Down the Lineup Card: Success rates by state for HS, school and conference for College, and country for Int’l. Drill-down by position to marry career arc with productivity, payroll/earnings, lead times, and success rates by source.

This perspective certainly seems to favor signing straight out of high school. A few observations:

+61% Contract Value – This is significant. The average adjusted payroll figure for the 286 players that came out of high school is $4.88m Compare that with the average payroll figure of college-sourced players being $3.02m and it’s hard to ignore the delta. $1.86m more per HS-sourced player is a big number. I’m not sure I have a great answer for the why, but it’s not negligible. Some possibilities might be: a) since HS player count is nearly a third of the College count, maybe the hit rate for HS players is lower than College, b) maybe the superstar rate (% that pop and go big) is higher for HS versus College (the top-100 earner sources would suggest otherwise), or c) top HS prospects get drafted higher and, thus, have higher contract values out of the gate.
Count Slanted to College - 56% of the 1,341 players on an MLB payroll as of July 2023 came from college. 22% came from the international pool and 21% directly from high school. This could suggest that MLB franchises favor college players, but why? Cheaper bets based on slotted dollars for middle rounds? I don’t have a good answer, but 56% vs 21% can’t be dismissed.
%Payroll Also Slanted to College – 47% of the MLB total payroll figure of $4.89 billion (Jul 2023) is allocated to players who came from College. I’m not sure that the % allocation means much more than college players are not an afterthought for MLB franchises.

Conclusion: While career earnings do not vary wildly from College to HS for the top-100 (8% delta), current-year Contract Values vary considerably (61% delta). Why the variance? I’ll pull on that thread more once I determine why explaining the variance matters – it feels like quite a snipe hunt otherwise.

Back to the original question of whether the CWS matters or not. Is the college player pool even relevant to MLB systems or is it just a system roster filler? If I’m a talented high schooler, is it a no-brainer to sign out of high school? Am I trimming down my earning potential by playing college ball first?

According to the Top-100 earners data, High Schoolers do not make astoundingly more money over their entire career than those who choose to play College ball first. Throw in career earnings for another 5,000 and we'll see if the top-100 are representative of the overall player pool. Control for years and minimum service time and we can zero in even more with career earnings.
Current payrolls suggest that HS signees are making more in-season than collegians - 61% more on average for the 2023 season. Why? Could it be the big money given to premier high schoolers to sign? Since it takes 3.08 years for the average pro baller to hit the Bigs, I’ll filter out all players with less than 3.08 years and see what the data shows. Looking at the data by position and profiling the big earners who tilt the scales may offer an explanation for this 61% disparity in 2023.

Signing out of high school is far from a no-brainer. With NIL and the transfer portal, college players have the new ability to change their scenery and make money they never could. Looking at the Top-100 and 2023 payrolls, it's evident the College World Series does matter, but it doesn't seem to be any more important than travel baseball paid showcases, MLB scout-selected events, or other top HS events.