A look at the result of Trent Baalke’s draft picks

The San Francisco 49ers made deal with the Detroit Lions, trading Eli Harold for a seventh round pick. It marks yet another departure from the well of former 49ers general manager Trent Baalke’s draft picks. Only a few picks remain with the team, most are either on practice squads or outright out of the league.

Actually, a lot have had this effect.

It’s well known Baalke had difficulty finding talent throughout the draft. It was well apparent most of his choices simply did not work out, but what about some hard data?

Below, following this post I compiled a spreadsheet of every Baalke draft pick during his tenure as general manager. The results are even more disturbing than I thought they would be. While some of the 2011 picks are released/retired/out of the league, it’s the later picks that really show what’s been going on. Baalke made 61 picks total.

41 percent of those picks (26) are either free agents or retired as of this writing. That means with the exception of those few retirements, not only did they not fit in with the 49ers, they didn’t fit in anywhere.

Going a bit further, I looked at how many of those 61 picks were outright released by the 49ers. Full disclosure: when the 49ers waived a player, I counted it as a release. If the player wound up on the practice squad, I tried my best to make sure this was documented as a ‘release’ (Kaleb Ramsey is listed as a retirement). Something to keep in mind with this data.

With that in mind, the number rounds out to 35. 35 players or 57 percent of all of Trent Baalke’s draft picks either were released by the team or retired during their time with the 49ers.

Over half.

Note, in the data below, I have free agency listed as an option, however I didn’t dive too far into it as free agency is an entirely different beast.

So about that Eli Harold trade. That trade spurned curiosity into all of this, and the last question is what value Baalke was able to get from his picks in trades. Of his 61 picks, ten of those turned into trades. Only three were even trades; A.J. Jenkins for Jon Baldwin, Brandon Thomas for Jeremy Kerley (actually, in my opinion the 49ers won that trade, but we won’t go into that), and Cam Thomas (taken in the seventh round) for a seventh round pick.

There was only one trade the 49ers actually won and that was Trent Brown to the New England Patriots. Even that’s up for debate since the 49ers had to give an additional pick in return for the Patriots third rounder. Six of the other trades were for lower value. Lower value I identified as a certain round pick going for a lower round, IE, a 3rd round pick being traded to get a seventh back.

The results are actually damning and display why exactly Trent Baalke was fired. We can say his picks were bad or that his personality didn’t work, but with this data right here if over half of your draft picks are released by the team, you simply cannot function in the NFL. It’s amazing how quickly John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan turned things around despite this. One bad draft is one thing, but Baalke has drafts (plural) where a majority of players that are no longer affiliated with the team or any team.

The spreadsheet I made is below.

Thanks, Baalke.