SPECULATOR: Avoiding this year's Ketel Marte

We put a ton of effort into unearthing the next late-round "sleeper", but there's an underappreciated part of player evaluation that can be even more important: avoiding landmines, particularly early in drafts.

Ron Shandler's research in the 2020 Baseball Forecaster noted that the early rounds are littered with landmines. His key finding: 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% were a mere "loss" (a 1-3 round loss).

One of those landmines entering 2020 was Ketel Marte (2B, ARI). We actually panned Marte as an avoid in last year's version of this column—he came with several landmine-worthy traits...

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