OK, the dust has settled on the Guardians draft this year and here is what I know and what my opinions are:
- The Guardians signed all 21 of their draft picks.
- The Guardians did that by spending their whole draft budget and almost all of their $916,517 5% overage, currently leaving only $33,517 left of that overage.
- The Guardians spent more money on this draft than any other team has ever spent on a draft. Clearly, part of that is from having the #1 overall pick AND the 10th pick in each round in a year where escalators made this this richest draft, slot value-wise, in baseball history, beating last year due to those escalators.
- The Guardians, using that budget and with the aid of Travis Bazzana signing for $1,620,000 under slot, they ended up signing FOUR players for over $2 million (Bazzana, Doughty, Cozart and Oakie) and signed another (Mobley) for $1,800,000.
- Unlike a lot of other teams this year who signed some of their draft picks for as low as $1,000, the Guardians signed every one of their draft picks for at least $25,000 and actually signed 7 of their 3rd day picks for the maximum allowable without being counted against their draft budget, $150,000. I haven't checked all the bonus numbers from this and previous drafts but in my memory, for the Guardians, to spend this much total money on 3rd day picks WITHOUT having ANY overslot signings is very unusual, if not unprecedented.
1. Chris Antonetti said that they really didn't know who they were going to select 1-1 until about 20 minutes before the draft. People may think that was because they didn't know if they wanted to take Bazzana. I don't think that was it at all. I think what they wanted to know was whether they would be able to spend effectively the bonus pool excess created by Bazzana's bonus would give them when taken in conjunction with their 5% overage. I think they had a strategy but it was a complex one that involved finding out, on draft day, how many overslot signings they could afford and who they could draft to spend that money.
2. I think it was Mike Tyson who said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. I think, like every team in every draft, the Guardians had a plan that fell apart pretty early in the draft. I think they were looking for a pitcher they thought they could get either Ben Hess or Kash Mayfield (or both) with their CB-A and 2nd round picks but both those guys were gone, so they went with Doughty and then Cozart, the latter to infuse a little slot/talent appropriate catching into their system. With the money they saved by paying Doughty and Cozart almost slot they could start, on Day 2, to spend their bonus excess for overslot signings of stud prospects who fell due to bonus demands. They first drafted Oakie and then used the homework they did to find guys they felt the market had undervalued either because of lower upside or injury. In this way they could save more money for two more overslot bonuses at the end of Day 2.
3. They had done their homework, both on this draft and historically, and KNEW that there were two ways to spend excess bonus pool money: draft-eligible college sophomores and high school pitchers, both of whom historically, would require overslot bonuses. When the sophomores they wanted weren't available, they pivoted to a group, quality HS RHP, who are always available throughout any draft IF you are willing to pay for them. Two reasons they are always available is because they require overslot bonuses and HS RHP are one of the most risky groups to pick becasue they have a very high failure rate compared to most other types of players in a draft. All they had to do, and they did it well, was identify which HS pitchers could be enticed to forgo college and which ones were absolutely going to college. The beauty of knowing which ones would sign for huge overslot bonuses and roughly how much it would take, allowed them to come up with Sullivan and Mobley, with Mobley being the most difficult to sign. They knew they could sign Sullivan but they had to make sure that they would have enough left for Mobley. Once they did the math they let Mobley know they wanted to draft him and verified what it would take to sign him. Then they could do the math to make sure the guys they drafted with the rest of their day 2 picks would give them enough money to sign all these overslot RH HS pitchers.
4. On Day 3 all they had to do was make sure that all the guys they drafted would sign for $150,000 or less, including Jacob Remily, the last HS RHP they selected in 2024.
5. The Guardians also knew they had a very deep minor league system. They had already been releasing players of the type (e.g., Joe Naranjo) who they normally wouldn't release mid-season. They knew that they would have to add all these draft choices to their 165 which would probably cause them to release even more valuable prospects from the bottom of that 165 group, prospects who they weren't ready to give up on. For that reason, they didn't break their tradition of signing very few non-drafted free agents although this year they had a little more excess bonus money ($33,516) than they normally had. So they only signed one college pitcher and no college catchers as NDFAs, the latter being a group they have gone to in the recent draft just to give their young pitchers experienced catchers to throw to as they break into professional baseball.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
When the dust settled the Guardians were left with 4 highly rated HS pitchers who likely would have each been more highly rated (like Doughty was) if they had been deemed signable for slot value based on their ability. The rest of their draft, except for Cozart, was incidental although the Guardians, as they always do, will likely find valuable role players among the pitchers they drafted. I think their confidence that their college pitcher development system and ability to rehab injured college pitchers was still a huge strength of their development system and went to that strength. In the end they drafted 11 college pitchers who are developmental or rehab projects and signed another as their only (so far) NDFA.
In conclusion, I think the Guardians executed an effective and intelligent, albeit risky, plan to focus on HS pitchers since they had an excess of money. If it was me I would have focused more on college sophomores for my post-Bazzana picks but the Guardians went with a group, HS RHP, whose availability would be much less in question and, frankly, a group whose ability more matched their bonus demands than draft eligible sophomores, using Alex Mooney as an example who burned them in 2023 and was responsible for them not having the funds to sign Marohn and Heuer from that draft.
Will the Guardians' strategy be successful? It's hard to tell but they got a lot of highly ranked prospects from this draft, getting #1, #36, #42, #46, #80, #118, #147 and #245 in the first 300 picks in this draft. That is extreme value, in my opinion.
Last question that comes to mind for me: How does this draft impact the top-to-bottom integrity of our prospect pipeline? This is the one place I think this draft failed. Instead of injecting pitching into the middle (i.e., high A) level of the Guardians development pipeline, it added more pitchers to the bottom of the pipeline to go along with Humphries, Bresnahan, Zinn and Zibin. Adding Doughty, Oakie, Sullivan, Mobley and Remily to this group means that we will have NINE very young pitchers who, if they are successful, will all get to the major leagues about the same time. At the same time, we have very few pitchers at Lynchburg and Lake County who look like they are likely to become ML pitchers, with most of our priority pitching prospects now being at AA and AAA. So the strategy employed this year created a hole in the pitching pipeline without adding hitting A or A+ in our hitting pipeline.
Redundancy is important up and down the pipeline and having your pitching pipeline all of sudden become bottom heavy without adding to the hitting pipeline at upper levels may create a problem for the Guardians in the future of the same type they have with their MIFers right now at AAA and the majors. Their just may not be enough repetitions to find out early enough which guys are keepers and which guys are not going to make it as starters and need to be moved either in trade or to another role in the system to fill a different need.
I HATE the expression that you don't truly know what you have in a draft for 5 years because it is often used to cover up an obvious (to me) bad draft that is obvious to me at the time of the draft. However, I think, in this case, for the 2024 Guardians draft, this is EXACTLY the case. Let's hope in 5 years the extreme promise of this draft will be realized with a new pipeline of young guns in our pitching staff.
Therefore, my grade for this Guardians draft is a B+ with the obvious chance to move all the way up to an A+ if their pitching development system can do its usual magic.
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