So most MLB draft rankings have been finalized, and I think it's a pretty good time to talk BASEBALL RECRUITING. Wake only has two ranked guys heading into the draft next week (Garrett Whitley and John Aiello), but both will likely be drafted fairly highly, and neither is likely to end up on campus. Whitley is ranked #18 in PG's Draft Top 500, while Aiello is #149 there. In Baseball America's Top 500, Whitley is #7, while Aiello is #228.
This got me thinking about Tom Walter, and how he's done in recruiting over his 6+ years here. I took a look at the PG High School Recruit rankings over the years and crunched the numbers. They're... not great. PG has rankings going all the way back to 2004, which gives us 6 years before Walter's first proper class in 2010, and 6 classes since. (Symmetry!)
Here's what I found:
This isn't perfect data (for starters, it includes guys who bolted for the MLB), but it's surprisingly uniform. At every top 100 interval, our recruiting has dropped. The money shot here is the "% Top 200" line. That seems to be a sweet spot for college baseball recruiting-- most top 100 guys will bolt anyway (indeed, not including our two top 100 recruits this year, we've lost 2 of 3 going back to 2004, with the lone exception being an injury-plagued Daniel Marrs, back in 2008). In the pre-Walter years, we had some 10.6% of recruits come from the #100-199 range in PG's rankings. (Only one of those, 2009's Harold Johnson, left for the MLB.) Walter, by contrast, has gotten 3.2% of his recruits from that range-- just two players, with one of them (2013's Dylan Manwaring) leaving for the Braves. The other one was Kevin Jordan.
Some of Walter's percentages here are understandably diluted; he took in 17 more recruits than Wake took in the preceding 6 seasons. A lot of his recruits, though, got generic "Top 500" or "Top 1000" rankings from PG. Because PG went at least up to #500 in their actual rankings every year, I didn't include those generic "Top 500" indicator in the Top 500 rankings count in the above chart. For instance, in 2011, Walter signed the #499 guy in PG's rankings, as well as one with the generic "Top 500" indicator. The #499 guy counts in the Top 500 percentage above; the generic Top 500 indicator does not.