2024 Draft - Part 19 - The Undiscovered Country - Unusual Places To Get Good Players In The Draft

 Around this time of year, casual draft fans are likely thinking about first round picks, multi-tool college juniors and high school senior studs.

However, for those who are draft geeks, the draft is much more nuanced than that with the following additional groups:  

• Injured college players - Chase DeLauter, Zach Plesac and others are good examples of how investing in an injured player who has fallen in the draft due to his injury is a good thing to do.  Get talent at a discount.  This is especially true for college pitchers who may fall off of teams' radars if they don't pitch in a season or in most of a season due to injury.  Teams may not follow up on a guy, thinking he may just be going back to college.  So, in some instances, a good scout can get a player to sign who wasn't even thinking about that after his injury.
• Draft-eligible college sophomores - In the past this group was limited to red-shirt sophomores or, in rare cases, double-red-shirt freshmen.  Basically, guys who were 21 or older, had been in college for 3 years but who used up less years of eligibility than that.  The new CBA changed that and included sophomores, even legitimate, non-redshirted sophomores who turn 21 within a few weeks after the draft (August 1st is the deadline now, I think).  This includes guys who enroll in college at age 19 and, therefore, reach 21 years old after only 2 real years in college. The downside of this group, as Alex Mooney showed last year, is that they have EXTREME leverage over the team that drafts them.  That's because, as sophomores, they can just go back to school if they don't get the bonus they want and still be draft-eligible two more times before they use up their college eligibility.   Therefore, after high school pitchers, this is the most risky group to pick from, in terms of being able to sign them to a reasonable bonus.   The better ones almost always sign for way over slot and, in some cases, change their minds AFTER they are drafted and ask for more money which can severely hamstring your draft budget.
• College seniors - These are guys who have exhausted their college eligibility.  They have very little leverage but are generally selected by teams in the first 10 rounds to save money (signing for $1-10 K) or selected on the 3rd day of the draft for depth prospects (generally signing for $1K).
• Red-shirt college juniors - These guys are, by age, really college seniors but by eligibility they still have one year left before exhausting their college eligibility. This gives them a little more leverage than college seniors if a team tries to lowball them, but these guys are generally signable for slot money or a little higher.
• Draft-eligible college players in the transfer portal - To me, this IS part of the undiscovered country of the draft.  It used to be that college transfers had to sit a year before they could play.  With the new transfer portal rules, they are almost always eligible to play at their new college the next year.  The point here is that a player who wants to transfer is, for some reason, not satisfied with their current college.  Maybe the coaches who recruited them have left.  Maybe they weren't getting playing time.  Maybe they weren't as visible to scouts because they played at smaller colleges.  And, most recently, maybe they weren't able to get much NIL money at their former college.  But there's always a reason.  ML teams may be able to leverage that, trading the certainty of bonus money for the uncertainty of a new college.   Some players in the portal aren't draft-eligible yet because they are true freshman or sophomores.  But the ones who are eligible?  Well, that may represent a place where you can get a college player to sign who would normally just go back to school.  Chase Burns was a transfer portal guy, so there is ML talent in the portal, if a player is draft-eligible and a ML team is looking!
• Re-classified high school seniors -  Some HS juniors who have enough credits to graduate HS decide they want to get their college careers started and, therefore, graduate early, reclassifying themselves as de facto HS seniors.  As scouts and teams tend to focus on the draft-eligible guys that year, a player who re-classifies himself may slide under the radar and teams may not draft him because, well, they just don't know enough about him.  Smart teams should be looking for these re-classified guys as they could represent more undiscovered country in draft-eligible players.
• Draft-and-follow college players - Back in the day, as us old people say, when there were 40 or 60 or more rounds in the draft, you just couldn't find enough quality prospects to draft.  During that period teams would hedge their bets and draft a guy who was going to junior college or who was a junior college freshman who was going back to their school.   Instead of signing those players within the normal signing period, they were allowed to sign those players all they way up to the next draft.  While that practice was discontinued a few years ago, the new CBA reinstated it and they also added an interesting caveat.  While a drafted player can be signed for up to $150,000 without it counting against your draft pool, a draft-and-follow player signed the next year can be signed for $225,000 without it counting against that pool.  So the $75,000 additional to play with is the carrot.  But the stick is that, if a player doesn't sign the following year you have lost that player.  It would sting a little more to not sign 1 player in your 20 round draft compared to not signing 1 player in a 60 round draft as happened, wait for it....in the old days.

So, there are some more things that I hope the Guardians draft staff are thinking about as they look for talent.  Overlaying those things are the performances of players in the Cape Cod Summer League that I covered in Part 18 of this series as well as organizational strategy, such as the Guardians (and Dodgers and Reds) drafting a bunch of college pitchers in 2021 and the Guardians drafting a bunch of LH slap hitters with good strike zone judgement in 2022 and 2023.  

When you are a small market team you should ALWAYS be looking for the undiscovered country.  Let's hope the Guardians find some again this year and that that helps them to strike it rich in the 2024 draft.