What’s the big difference between high school and college talent, anyway?Let’s examine some of the pros and cons of each of the Rule 4 avenues of talent acquisition, as to which is the most efficient from a standpoint of cost versus reward.The Good, the Bad, and the UglyThe Good The younger you can get players into the developmental process the better, so taking quality immature athletes at 18 years old and allowing them to mature under a professional hand will make them more malleable than athletes entering the process at a more physically mature state.Physical immaturity allows room for projection, the tool scouts and team personnel use to forecast the talent of a player at the top of his developmental arc.Projection is what separates the majority of high school athletes from their college counterparts, allowing teams to dream of a future that will find players more advanced than they are at the point of initial acquisition.This is the foundation of the argument in favor of drafting high school talent over college talent.The Bad Higher risk.As with any human experience that requires stages of development to reach fruition, the likelihood of finding projected promise is rather slim.Just take a look at your own experiences, starting with the life you scripted back in high school.Did you end up going to the college of your choice, graduating with the degree you envisioned, and turning that degree into the career you always dreamed of?Can you look back and say, Yep, this is exactly how it was supposed to go.For most of us, life’s road has many turnings.This is the real challenge in making an investment in high school talent.For some teams, that’s too potent a cocktail in which to invest millions of dollars.The structure of the showcases can alienate certain pockets of talent.It’s never a given that players will transition their present skills to professional ball, but college players give you less to be wrong about, as the conceptual space between present and future isn’t nearly as wide and unforgiving as with high school draftees.When you are able to remove some of the guess from the guessing game, you set yourself up to develop more major league talent.At the college level, you are getting a more refined product, but finding premium talent outside of the first few rounds is unlikely.The Not Quite So Ugly, but Not Really Pretty, Either It’s to be expected that a college coach should focus on winning versus the development of the players he is tasked with coaching.It’s hard to fault a coach for riding his ace to wins, even if that means starting him on Friday and bringing him out of the bullpen on Sunday.It seems excessive to fans of the professional game, and of course it is, but the program has to take precedence over the progress of the individual after he leaves said program.However, that doesn’t always leave the product coming out of college undamaged.Hitters face their own risks.Because of the nature of the offensive game in college, hitters often adopt bad habits.With inferior pitchers toeing the hill on most days, hitters can alter their swing mechanics to punish those with velocity deficiencies.Unfortunately, this doesn’t always paint a promising picture of the player, as the deficient swing mechanics either turn off professional eyes or prove problematic to adjust once that player reaches professional ball.The college game often creates an environment where fundamentals are either glossed over or misappropriated for the benefit of the program, which is great for the team but not always great for the player.Player DevelopmentWe’ve looked at the evaluation process and the pros and cons of two forms of amateur talent acquisition, building the skeleton inside baseball’s body.It all starts with eyes on the talent, forming observations and a framework for what is possible in the future.Talent is then acquired, with team philosophy, scouting talent, and internal necessity dictating which avenue is better suited for the particular draft slot.Player development is reducible to talent.Without quality amateur talent, you can’t develop quality professional talent, so the key moment in player development happens not at any point after a prospect puts on his uniform for the first time, but before it, when he is drafted.What happens subsequently is an act of talent refinement, not talent creation.After the amateur handoff occurs, it falls to coaches and coordinators to begin the process of acclimation.They will be responsible for teaching the basics of the organization, including conveying a sense of expectations and obligations.This task normally takes place at the team complex, which instructional leagues and spring training call home base.The blanket philosophies are usually the same for most organizations, emphasizing a winning attitude along with progress and personal responsibility.However simple that might sound, getting the organizational tone to ring between the ears of immature players is quite difficult, and the patience of the coaching and coordinating staff is likely to be tested almost immediately.Dissention and mixed signals will only be met with confusion and stagnated results.The developmental hierarchy has to communicate in order to develop the best possible plan for the player in question.It’s a team effort and when it loses that consensus, the player suffers.In order to begin the developmental process, several questions have to be answered, including establishing who the player is at present and what you expect him to develop into in the future.Scouts offer this conceptual reality with their initial reports, but as players move into their new professional life, some of their tools will evolve faster than others.Having received the player, it’s up to the developmental team to reevaluate their stock, deciding which deficiencies need the most attention.When a breakdown in the process occurs, the likelihood of success diminishes.Yes, some players have the raw physical ability to reach the major leagues based only on those characteristics, but the true ceiling is rarely reached if a player lacks the intangible qualities that help push the physical ones to their limit.Was the problem purely a physical one, meaning, was the player not as physically gifted as the evaluation suggested, or was the culprit the inability to take advantage of those qualities on the field?The push for success requires intense mental focus and fortitude.It’s the job of the developmental team not only to help a player refine those physical skills on the field, but also to instill and encourage the work ethic and mental push necessary to maximize the potential offered by the physical.When any one variable in the equation fails, the process itself fails, and the player and the team are left pondering what could have been.As we watch our heroes on the diamond, their origin often seems secondary, pushed behind the curtain of our present experience.Too rarely do we stop to appreciate the journey taken by that talent from seed to superstar.Players don’t magically appear at the highest level without first being discovered, developed, and delivered by a series of events and the intervention of a large contingent of experienced baseball men.They have been given shape by the evaluation, acquisition, and developmental process.The next time you cast eyes upon the splendid geometry of a stadium, watching as your favorite players play your favorite game, remind yourself of the incredible procedure that was necessary in order to bring those players to life.At one point, every jersey on the field was an immature amateur wandering through the wide chasm between the realities of the present and the possibilities of the future.How Does Age Affect the Amateur Draft?But he wasn’t yet a phenom.The Angels drafted him with the 25th pick overall, and they’ll tell you today that they knew he was destined to be a special player.It didn’t take Trout long to prove that everyone had underestimated him.If you were starting a franchise from scratch today, there aren’t 10 players in baseball you’d pick before Trout.Many times, there’s no satisfactory answer to that question.To this day, no one has been able to adequately explain why every team in baseball misjudged him so badly.In Trout’s case, there’s one astoundingly obvious reason why he was underrated going into the draft.This is relevant because, unlike most players drafted out of high school, Trout was still just 17 years old when he was picked.Baseball’s aging curve is fairly well known by now.Most hitters peak at or around the age of 27, and their performance usually follows a parabolic curve, rapidly improving in their late teens and early 20s, then a more gradual improvement in their mid 20s, before a gradual decline in their late 20s that accelerates in their 30s.The implication of the aging curve is that the younger a player is the more improvement he is likely to show over a given period of time.If one of them is 20 and one of them is 21, the differences can be massive, and much greater than you would intuitively expect.How much difference is there in the expected career home run totals for the two players?This is what made Jason Heyward’s rookie season so promising.This is why, despite his sophomore struggles, he has almost limitless upside.Incidentally, like Trout, Heyward didn’t turn 18 until the August after he was drafted.Meanwhile, the oldest high school hitter selected first overall, Shawon Dunston, already 19 at the time, spent his entire career leaving people wanting more.Yet, given these and other examples, I wondered if the baseball industry as a whole has underestimated the importance of age.I wondered if, given two players taken at the same slot in the draft, the younger player returned greater value.If there is an effect to be seen, it should be most obvious in high school hitters.Those players were eliminated from the study, leaving us with a data set of 846 players.Obviously, the team that drafted a player in 1980 was far more likely to benefit from his performance in 1982 than from his performance in 1990, when he was far more likely to have moved on to another team via trade or free agency.Incorporating a discount value accounts for this.That is to say, the value of a draft pick correlates with the reciprocal of the square root of the pick number.By this formula, the #1 overall pick is three times more valuable than the #9 pick, four times more valuable than the #16 pick, and so on.It also means that the #6 pick is twice as valuable as the #36 pick, and the #25 pick is twice as valuable as the #100 pick.And if you’ve made it to the end of this paragraph, you need to get out more.Now that we have a simple formula for calculating what a particular draft pick should be worth, we can evaluate whether players who were particularly young or old were likely to return more or less value expected on their investment.For example, we can look at the very first draft in 1965, when 25 high school hitters were selected among the top 100 picks.The oldest of them was a shortstop named Carl Richardson.For the sake of standardization, we set draft day as occurring on June 1 for every year, so in our system, Richardson is listed as a day shy of 19 years old on his draft day.Richardson was selected #77 overall by the Cincinnati Reds.On the other hand, the youngest high school hitter selected in the 1965 draft was a catcher from Oklahoma who was born on December 7, 1947, making him more than 18 months younger than Spencer.It turns out that hitter, Johnny Bench, was worth considerably more than that.Now that you get the idea, here’s some data.I took the five youngest players from every draft from 1965 through 1996, and compared them to the five oldest players from the same draft.Over the 32 years combined, the youngest players in each year’s draft were expected to produce slightly less value than the oldest players, because on average they were taken with slightly later draft selections.Despite that, the five youngest players in each year returned more than twice as much value as the five oldest players.If you adjust for the fact that the older group had a slightly higher expected value on Draft Day, the younger group had a return that was 117 percent higher than the older group.While the advantage enjoyed by younger players ebbs and flows, it doesn’t appear to grow or diminish over time.Young high school hitters are simply much more likely to develop into stars, particularly players who weren’t elite picks.I already mentioned Johnny Bench, who went from the second round to the Hall of Fame.Lemon was 17 years, 3 months, and went on to a fantastic career.The following year, two of the five youngest high school hitters went on to the Hall of Fame.Murray was two weeks younger than Lemon had been.Murray and Lemon, in fact, were both among the six youngest hitters in the entire study.He was a month younger than Mike Scioscia, drafted 19th overall that year.In 1980, the 71st overall pick was used on a young high school second baseman named Danny Tartabull.In 1986, the Brewers had the sixth overall pick, and didn’t screw it up, using it to select Gary Sheffield.In 1992, Derek Jeter was selected at #6 overall, and Jason Kendall, born on the same day, was selected with the 23rd pick.In the last year of the study, 1996, the youngest player selected in the top 100 was Jimmy Rollins, who was drafted 46th overall.The best players in the entire study selected from among the five oldest high school hitters in their draft class were Willie Wilson, Johnny Damon, and Richie Hebner.At least when it comes to high school hitters, young draft picks are a massive market inefficiency.The youngest high school hitters in a draft class have had twice the return on investment as the oldest high school hitters, and this advantage does not appear to be diminishing over time.Let’s take a more comprehensive view of the data.Very Old players were more than 18 years, 200 days old.As you can see, there is an almost shockingly smooth progression in the data.Very young players, as a whole, return 25 percent more value than expected by their draft slots.Young and average players also return positive value, whereas old and very old players return substantially less value than expected.The youngest group returns about 86 percent more value than the oldest group, as opposed to the 117 percent cited above.It’s still an enormous difference.