Expanded Roster: JO-EY, JO-EY And The Rule 5 Draft

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JO-EY JO-EY: Joey Rickard and the Rule 5 Draft
By Joe Wantz

photo by Keith Allison

The Orioles love the Rule 5 draft. They love the Rule 5 draft like Romeo loved Juliet. They love the Rule 5 draft like Baltimoreans love crab cakes. They love the Rule 5 draft like…ok, you get the idea. The Orioles have selected a player in every Rule 5 draft since 2006, though not all of those have ended up making the team. That’s eleven straight drafts. The next longest streak? The Phillies, with selections in four straight.

Clearly, the Orioles see value in the Rule 5 draft that most teams do not, and the makeup of the team is reflective of that viewpoint. They have carried a Rule 5 player on the Major League roster each year since 2012 and currently have three Rule 5 picks on the 25 man: Ryan Flaherty, TJ McFarland, and Ted Williams…er, Joey Rickard. The man, the myth, the leadoff hitter has had a phenomenal start to his career as an Oriole, providing good defense, good contact skills, an outstanding eye at the plate, and even a little bit of power. It started in Spring Training, with Rickard slashing a phenomenal .397/.472/.571 with a home run and five stolen bases. He was good enough not only to make the team out of camp but to start in left field on Opening Day. Since then, he hasn’t looked back, starting each of the team’s first 7 games and hitting .370/.367/.556 in the season’s first week.

This is, to say the least, a surprising turn of events. Less that the Orioles kept a Rule 5 player (which is right up there with the sun rising in terms of a shocker) and more that he has looked like anything but. After a somewhat lackluster start to his minor league career, Rickard broke out in 2015 as a member of the Tampa Bay organization, putting up a .360/.437/.472 debut at AAA Durham in 2015. This makes it all the more notable that Rickard was exposed to the Rule 5 draft and made it to the 8th overall pick. That may be due to his overall scouting report, which portrayed Rickard as a good fourth outfielder as opposed to a regular contributor.

He was, however, the 98th ranked prospect in Fangraphs’ KATOH projection system published in late 2015 and had previously been ranked as a top 10 prospect for the Rays. KATOH takes a novel approach to prospect evaluation, focusing not on projectability and scouting reports but solely on minor league statistics. As a result, KATOH differs fairly significantly from more traditional prospect rankings and does not take into account player tools. This is certainly not meant to be a definitive model of player evaluation (which the creator Chris Mitchell readily admits), but it does provide a way to look at players who might otherwise be undervalued by traditional scouting.

This projection fits in with the Orioles’ initial interest in Rickard. Steve Melewski of MASN reported this week that it was not the Orioles’ scouting department that took an interest in him but rather the analytics staff. This put him on GM Dan Duquette’s radar screen, and that interest was confirmed by Felipe Alou Jr., who coached Rickard’s Dominican Winter League team and runs the O’s Dominican academy. This dovetailing of analytics and scouting has, at least so far, made the Orioles look like a bunch of geniuses.

Of course, Rickard’s current production is very unlikely to continue. He is almost certainly not going to be an All Star-type performer, but there is reason to believe that his skill set can play at the Major League level. KATOH projected Rickard to put up 3.8 WAR through his age 28 season, which would be 2019. At this rate, he might eclipse that mark this season, but let’s optimistically say the number is somewhere around 2.5 WAR per year. This would put him at +10 WAR for his career. That would be a solid number for most players but extraordinary for a Rule 5 pick. The table below shows the top 12 performers by career WAR that have been selected and kept by a new team in the Rule 5 draft since 2006.

Name	Year	Original Team	New Team	Career WAR
Josh Hamilton	2006	Tampa Bay	Cubs	27.8
R.A. Dickey	2007	Minnesota	Seattle	16.3
Joakim Soria	2006	San Diego	Kansas City	9.7
Everth Cabrera	2008	Colorado	San Diego	4.2
Odubel Herrera	2014	Texas	Philadelphia	3.9
Hector Rondon	2012	Cleveland	Cubs	3.1
Jared Burton	2006	Oakland	Cincinnati	2.8
Josh Fields	2012	Boston	Houston	2.4
Mark Canha	2014	Miami	Oakland	1.4
Ryan Flaherty	2011	Cubs	Baltimore	1.4
Delino DeShields, Jr.	2014	Houston	Texas	1.2
TJ McFarland	2012	Cleveland	Baltimore	0.9

Note: The new team column doesn’t necessarily show the team the player ended up on, just the one that drafted them in the Rule 5. Hamilton, for example, was drafted by the Cubs and subsequently traded to the Reds.

We can see a few things here. First, the Orioles are nicely represented (I’m positive they signed Cabrera because he was once a Rule 5 guy but can’t prove it). Second, successful Rule 5 picks are hard to come by. Out of all the Rule 5 picks since 2006, only eleven have a career WAR of over 1. Rickard himself, at 0.3, is already in the top 15 after one week! The most notable names on the list are obviously the first three, with Josh Hamilton and R.A. Dickey being the obvious outliers. Those guys won an MVP and Cy Young award, respectively, and were well above average performers for several seasons. Soria has been, at times, a dominant reliever and has overcome some injury issues to settle into being a pretty good one.

A final interesting thing about this list is the fact that three of the top performers by WAR were drafted in the 2014 Rule 5: Odubel Herrera, Mark Canha, and Delino DeShields Jr. While none of those guys profile as future stars, they are useful players that have some upside for their teams. Indeed, with so much good young talent in the big leagues, perhaps this is a golden age in Rule 5 history.

Ultimately, it seems likely that Rickard will settle into that category. It is not particularly difficult to imagine him being a starting outfielder and giving the Orioles solid production. The 2.5 WAR per year would be a pretty aggressive projection to be sure, but even if he doesn’t hit for power or post a great batting average he can provide value with his defense and base running abilities. He has already shown those skills in his short time in Baltimore and figures to have a long leash this season. Hyun-Soo Kim and Nolan Reimold don’t seem like particularly big playing time threats at this point and it seems likely that Rickard will stay in the lineup when Adam Jones returns from injury. He may never reach the heights of someone like Josh Hamilton, but Rickard could very well end up being one of the best Rule 5 players of the past decade. We all might want to get used to chanting JO-EY JO-EY at the yard.