The INITIAL minor league rosters for our full-season teams are now out. Obviously things can change. But using those rosters, what does it say about our 2022 draft?
This article will take a look at where our 2022 draftees have been placed.
What strikes me after looking at the placements this year is that only one of our 2022 draftees has been placed at high A (Lampe). To be fair, our top 2 picks (DeLauter and Campbell) were not placed yet due to injuries (DeLauter is well known, Campbell was not throwing when I was at spring training so he may just be behind). In comparison, 8 of our 2021 college draftees were placed at High A in their first full year. Dylan DeLucia, our 6th round pick, was also not placed on a full-season roster and as polished as he is, I would guess it has to be due to injury. But all the rest of our 2022 college draftees were placed at Lynchburg whereas 8 of our college draftees in 2021 started 2022 in Lake County.
Very surprisingly both Messick and Furman were placed at low A Lynchburg. As college players picked in the early rounds of the 2022 draft, I would have guessed that both would have been placed at high A to challenge them. Both will be older than the average player in low A. As we saw with Will Dion last year, you don't tend to learn much about polished college players as they tend to dominate their league based on polish more than on talent. By comparison, Connor Kokx, our 11th round college outfielder pick in 2021, started his first full season at Lake County and is now assigned to Akron this year. If an 11th round position player could start at Lake County why couldn't a 5th round college second baseman start there.
Quite possibly, looking at Messck, there were no spots for 2022 college draftee pitchers at Lake County as 10 of the college pitchers we drafted in 2021 are on the Lake County staff. But, still, he is a second round pick. He shouldn't have started at Lynchburg.
The placement of Magnus Ellerts at Lynchburg is interesting as that shows he is further along than I thought.
All-in-all the placement of our 2022 college draftees was very disappointing to me although, as I said above, this is kind of deceptive as 3 of our top 7 picks weren't even placed on a team due to injury. Still, besides Ellerts, none of our 2022 draftees surprised me by being placed higher than I thought and, obviously, many of them were placed lower that I thought they should have been.
Nothing about these placements improved my confidence in the quality of our 2022 draft. When your top two picks start the season on the IL due to a pre-existing foot condition (DeLauter) and an elbow issue (Campbell) and only one of the rest of the 2022 draftees are even good enough to start at High A, it doesn't say much about the quality of the 2022 draft.
OK, more about the placements of players on this year's minor league teams later.
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