A few questions

[musicman]

I'm an Info Systems grad student who is hoping to get into baseball operations when I graduate in December, in particular, the Braves career program.

I'm considering designing and building some sort of web-based software that could take a list of players in the June draft and come up with a predication of draft order. Also a team could take that same software and determine who they would draft based on whatever criteria that set forth. Granted it wouldn't be perfect considering that teams also look at personal aspects that can't be analyzed.

I'm just wondering if anyone has ever done anything like this. I'm not looking to make money off of it. I just want something that may make me stand out to the people who choose for the program. If I still don't get in I plan to go for my doctorate in Sports Administration so doing this would help out there as well.

Any ideas that anyone has would be most helpful. I'm just now learning sabermetrics (reading Moneyball) and with my class load it's a slow go. I'm basically doing this because I have a passion for the game and I don't look forward to a corporate IT job. Heck, I umpire high school and college ball just so I can be around baseball.

[SABR Matt]

Hmm...seems to me it'd be kinda difficult to projec draft order or make draft recommendations using sabermetric ideals...statistics from high school and college ball are notoriously misleading, so unless you could get access to the in depth scouting charts the good scouts make when they watch a young player and parameterize their findings, I'm not sure how precise a program could be in pinpointing the draft order or making recommendations.

Granted I'm only an undergrad student (last-year...degree in meteorology forthcoming in 3 semesters), but I've been at work in the field of sabermetrics since I was 16 and am also pushing for a career in baseball. I'd be curious to hear more about your ideas to see what you had in mind when you talk about predicting the draft.

[musicman]

Right now, I honestly haven't got much. This is just in its initital stages. I'm taking a computer-based decision modeling class that should help push me in the right direction. I'm sure I'll be back with more questions, ideas, etc.