There are many ways a team can obtain talent. Trades and free agent signings are the sexiest ways. They get the headlines and generate tons of barroom discussion. Personally, while trades and free agency get the glory, I have always been an amateur draft man.

Many casual fans find the amateur draft to be too huge and esoteric to follow closely. There are usually 50-odd rounds. Most of the players (aside from the first round or two) are unknown to all but the most diehard of fan. And there is rarely no immediate payoff. A drafted player could take three or four years before he even begins to sniff major league playing time. But the draft is where winners are made. This is especially true for small market teams, who usually don't have the resources to bring in high-priced free agents.

It's no secret that the Pirates have been on the wrong end of a .500 winning percentage for over a decade. Poor drafting has played a large part of that. That much is obvious, but let's take a "scientific" look (and I use that term loosely) at the problem to see just how things have gone wrong.

For this study, we will be reviewing the Pirates' drafts from 1990 to 2000. I decided to evaluate each year's draft based on the major league contributions of the players the Pirates drafted (and signed) that year. To measure those contributions, I used Bill James' Win Shares player evaluation system.

I've been looking for a reason to play around with Win Shares for some time. It's a bit of a freakshow stat, but it's a fun freakshow stat. For the uninitiated, Win Shares represents a player's contributions to their team's wins as a simple integer. The beauty of the system is that it allows you to compare players regardless if they are a hitter or pitcher; a star or bench player; or a slugger or a defensive whiz. In addition, Win Shares are adjusted for park effects and for differences in era. The result is a simple way to measure players. Want to get a sense of a player's contributions to a team over three seasons? Simply add up the Win Shares. Want to evaluate a trade? Simply add up the Win Shares that each player earned for their new teams.

The problem with Win Shares is that it requires an incredibly complex series of equations to figure them out. Luckily, they are brave souls that are willing to do the heavy lifting for us. The first source is the 2002 book Win Shares by Bill James and Jim Henzler. This explains the stat and lists Win Shares for every player from 1876 to 2001. The Bill James Handbook 2005 also lists Win Shares for all active players who played last year, including their Win Shares for the previous ten years. There is also an online project publishing Win Shares, currently located at The Hardball Times. All of these sources were used in one form or another to get the Win Shares for players drafted by the Pirates from 1990 to 2000.

Okay, enough with the yap-yap. In the next installment, we'll get to the results. Stay tuned.