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Steve Bisciotti watches the NFL draft carefully. The Ravens’ owner arrives at the team’s war room every April, seated across from general manager Eric DeCosta, with a draftnik’s passion and a historian’s perspective.

He knows the kind of prospects who’ve panned out in Baltimore and flopped elsewhere. He knows what’s worked for Ozzie Newsome and DeCosta and what hasn’t for other decision-makers. There is a trust in the Ravens’ personnel process.

“I’m not going to look at Eric’s 200 whiffs,” Bisciotti said in January, after he’d fired longtime coach John Harbaugh. “I’ll look at his 800 singles and doubles and home runs.”

When DeCosta meets this month with Ravens officials, coaches and scouts to build the team’s draft board, they will look far and wide for help for a team that was the NFL’s biggest disappointment last year. The Ravens have three top-80 picks, including the No. 14 overall selection. They cannot afford to strike out on Day 1 or Day 2 in their first year under coach Jesse Minter.

And yet DeCosta’s Day 3 batting average could be just as important. Since he took over as GM in 2019, DeCosta has routinely found stars and starters in the first round. But his Day 3 output has been mostly high volume, low return. The Ravens, needing more and more draft hits to support a core of increasingly costly veteran stars, have whiffed at a surprisingly high rate.

According to an analysis of every team’s draft since 2019, the Ravens rank third in the NFL in total Day 3 draft capital. Their 15 fourth-round picks, eight fifth-rounders, 10 sixth-rounders and five seventh-rounders amount to 1,060 points on the oft-cited Jimmy Johnson trade value chart, which effectively appraises each draft slot — the earlier the pick, the more it’s worth. Only the New England Patriots (1,164) and Jacksonville Jaguars (1,080) have used more draft capital over the past seven years.

But the Ravens’ investment record has been spotty. Their ratio of “Approximate Value” — Pro Football Reference’s imperfect but helpful measure of a player’s career contributions — to total draft capital is 13th worst in the NFL. The Chiefs’ draft picks since 2019, for example, have been almost as “valuable” as the Ravens’ despite Kansas City having had less than half as much capital.

The Ravens have no room for waste this year. They have Super Bowl hopes, little salary cap flexibility and an NFL-high eight Day 3 picks in the draft: one selection in the fourth round, four in the fifth, one in the sixth and two in the seventh.

If DeCosta’s best-player-available approach leads him elsewhere on Day 1 and Day 2, he could need to find a starting center and ready-made contributors at guard, wide receiver, tight end, defensive lineman and outside linebacker, along with a starting punter, during a marathon April 25.

“We’ve always been a draft-focused team, draft-centric,” DeCosta said last month. “We have 11 picks. We have a lot of work to do. … I think this team’s going to look different come September. We’re excited about it. There are a lot of opportunities for us to get better, and we plan to do that."

DeCosta has left drafts with handfuls of Day 3 gems, and he probably will again. In his two-plus decades of running the Ravens’ draft — first as director of college scouting, now as GM — few teams have been better stewards of late-round talent.

The Ravens landed tight end Dennis Pitta, fullback Kyle Juszczyk, guard Ben Powers and outside linebacker Za’Darius Smith in the fourth; outside linebacker Matthew Judon in the fifth; quarterback Tyrod Taylor, tight end Darren Waller, center Ryan Jensen and punter Sam Koch in the sixth; and defensive lineman Zach Sieler in the seventh. All made the Pro Bowl or went on to sign contracts that made them among the highest-paid players at their positions.

Undrafted finds have only burnished the Ravens’ depth. Kicker Justin Tucker, defensive lineman Michael Pierce and running back Gus Edwards, all signed under DeCosta, are among the franchise’s most impactful rags-to-riches stories. Even last year, inside linebacker Jay Higgins IV, cornerback Keyon Martin and safety Reuben Lowery made the team’s initial 53-man roster as undrafted rookies.

But the Ravens’ Day 3 cold streak now looms large. In 2022, they found four starters and key contributors on the final day of the draft: All-Pro punter Jordan Stout, tight ends Isaiah Likely and Charlie Kolar and right guard Daniel Faalele. DeCosta’s past three drafts, however, have produced just two regular starters, one of them a kicker (Tyler Loop), neither of them a standout. (Inside linebacker Teddye Buchanan is the other.)

Injuries, departures and development struggles have only underscored the Ravens’ draft misses. Just one of the past four interior offensive linemen they selected on Day 3 remains on the team. Left guard Andrew Vorhees, the lone survivor, struggled last season in his first year as a full-time starter.

Devontez Walker and LaJohntay Wester totaled just 136 receiving yards last season, all by Walker, for an underwhelming wide receiver room that finished 25th overall in the NFL in yardage (1,946).

Outside linebacker Tavius Robinson, who missed seven games after breaking his foot in mid-October, and defensive lineman Aeneas Peebles combined to play just over 500 defensive snaps for a diminished defensive front.

None of the Ravens’ young cornerbacks could challenge Marlon Humphrey for snaps during the worst season of his career.

At some point, the franchise’s late-round fortunes will turn. Even DeCosta acknowledged in 2021 that the draft is a “luck-driven process.” But the value proposition on Day 3 has perhaps changed in recent years, with the transfer portal and name, image and likeness deals luring more underclassmen back to school.

Although Matt Miller, a draft analyst for ESPN, said on a conference call last month that he hasn’t noticed an appreciable drop-off in prospect quality from Day 2 to Day 3, some teams have felt the squeeze. Ahead of the 2024 draft, DeCosta said the Ravens had fewer “draftable” players on their board than the year before. And, in February, Chiefs GM Brett Veach estimated that 25 players ranked among Kansas City’s top 100 prospects had passed on the draft to play another season in college. Overall, just 63 underclassmen entered this year’s draft, down from a record 144 in 2019.

“That’s something that we have to adapt to until there’s some wholesale changes on what they do on the college side,” Veach said at the NFL scouting combine. “I think this is just going to be the way things work now.”

A decade ago, after an injury-plagued 5-11 season, the Ravens entered the 2016 draft with nine picks and four fourth-rounders. (They’d later add a fifth.) DeCosta knew the promise of that war chest; the class’ eventual success, he said, would depend on the team’s Day 3 haul.

“We’ve got to get some starters with those fourth-round picks,” he said. “Our challenge will be to get four starters with those picks, to nail those guys, because I know we’re going to do that in the first three.”

The Ravens did not get four starters — cornerback Tavon Young was their only real hit — but a round later they drafted Judon. In the first round, they’d landed a franchise left tackle in Ronnie Stanley.

Now, armed with 11 total draft picks, DeCosta needs to find Minter and his overhauled coaching staff some help. Or else the real cost of the Ravens’ lost production will soar, too.

“I think we’re on the same page,” Minter said last month at the NFL’s annual league meeting. “I really learned how to evaluate players here the first time [as an assistant coach in Baltimore]. And so I think we see a lot of that the same way. We just look forward to kind of being involved in that process, talking about the guys that we like and helping Eric to make the best decisions possible for the organization.”