Thinking about today's draft

OK, last night's post was rambling but, after the Cavs game, I hope you will bear with me.

So, today, let's have a few more, hopefully, lucid thoughts about yesterday's picks and today's draft.

Yesterday the Indians drafted two HS position players who were ranked about where they were drafted.   This implies they are looking long term, maybe with the thought of building on last year's HS-heavy first 10 rounds.  Good for them.  It also implies that they are not looking to draft a flyer who would require a higher than slot bonus.   Again, I applaud that approach as it becomes an all-or-nothing approach as, if you do that, you are likely to draft low cost college seniors who have less upside just to save bonus money for your flyer. .

So, what's ahead for today?

Hopefully the Indians will continue to draft HS players with talent appropriate to their slot.   The only issue is that it is hard to get good, highly-ranked HS players who will sign for slot money in rounds after 5.  The bonus slots are just not high enough to make it enticing enough for that kid to walk away from a college scholarship.   So the task of the scouts becomes more difficult: find a HS player who, while they have a college scholarship offer, don't really want to go to college and will accept slot money in the first 10 rounds...and do that with 29 other teams looking for the same types of kids!

So, expect some college juniors and maybe a juco player to be drafted today.  

What you don't generally want to see is, if you are drafting for slot talent at slot prices, the drafting of guys who aren't ranked.  If a team does that in the first 10 rounds those draft classes, in my experience, end up in drafts that really, really stink and are unproductive at producing ML players. 

Again, I like Skoug and Howard from TCU somewhere in the top 10 rounds.   Aside from that, I hope we take HS kids.