Some Thoughts For A Tuesday:
Protecting Teams From Themselves
Part of my plan for changes to the next collective bargaining agreement is to disallow trading of draft choices completely for teams that receive competitive balance picks and before round 11 for the rest of the teams.
Simply put, the reason for teams getting competitive balance picks is that these teams are resource-limited and are being incentivized to build from within through the draft process.
Competitive balance picks, besides adding a highly-ranked player to a team's farm system, also come with a hefty addition to a team's draft bonus pool. In this case the Guardians' draft bonus pool will be $3.2 million smaller as a result of this trade, significantly impacting their ability to draft and sign players to overslot bonuses in this draft.
The trade between Cleveland and San Francisco is a shining example of why teams given this gift of an extra draft pick and enhanced bonus pool should not be allowed to spend it on anything except for what it was intended: to draft and sign talented amateur players.
Combined with Cleveland's trade in January to 'sell' international bonus pool space to the Mets, Cleveland has avoided spending close to $5 million on amateur player acquisition this year. This is a bad, cheap look for Cleveland's ownership who have now found yet another way to be cheap and not spend money on this franchise.
BTW, for people who say Cleveland is never cheap on the draft, MOST teams are not cheap on the draft and their process in previous years is in line with what is done by most teams. It ain't anything special.
Movement at the Middle of The First Round
My premise for the Guardians in the upcoming draft was that they needed to add top tier college pitching in most of their picks. They were aced out of every quality college SP last year who fit their profile, making it 3 consecutive drafts without any college pitchers who weren't soft tossers. In fact, they haven't drafted a quality college starting pitcher since 2022 where they got Messick and Campbell. The latter is a great example of where a quality, hard-throwing college SP can have significant value even if he hasn't pitched for 3 years. The hype around the acquisition of Kal Stephen and his high rank in Cleveland's system is another example of the value of hard-throwing top shelf college pitchers, even though Stephen's performance so far with the Guardians has been underwhelming.
So, in a draft filled with college position players with holes in their game and all the typical question marks and risk with drafting high school hitters and pitchers in the first round, I was looking at snagging quality college arm at #19. My first couple of posts targeted Hunter Dietz as a guy the Guardians could overdraft to start them off on what I hoped would be a college pitcher centric 2026 draft. Well, Dietz has pitched so well this year (6-0 vs the top #1 starting pitchers in the SEC) that a guy ranked as low as 60-70 this spring may have raised his stock so much that he could be gone before the Guardians can draft him.
With the lack of quality college starting pitchers available in this draft and the Guardians giving away their second 1st round pick to San Francisco, this draft is trending for the Guardians toward being a combination of high upside/very low floor guys and more LHH contact hitters with good OB skills but meh upside. The 2025 was bad for the Guardians because they made the wrong picks. The 2026 draft could be bad because they might not be able to draft what they really need, quality, hard-throwing college starting pitchers.
In addition to Dietz's rise, other college starting pitchers with first round talent are performing well and are rising because every team now knows that if you want quality college starting pitching in this draft you better be willing to overdraft guys or be left with a draft without college pitchers with big upside.
That is hugely bad for the Guardians who have one of thinnest farm systems in regards to upper level starting pitcher prospects.
The Impact of No Competitive Balance Pick
Besides the bonus pool impact I talked about above, the other major impact in the loss of the 29th overall pick is how that impacts the Guardians draft strategy and other early picks. My plan for them was college SP, HS bat, college SP, college SP/RP, college SP/RP. has likely gone out the window as we don't have a pick to gamble with.
Without that Comp A pick, taking a HS bat early in this draft is just too big of a risk. With essentially 2 picks in the top 94 picks, taking a gamble on a guy like Landon Thome has now gone out the window and the Guardians will likely fall back on their fatal flaw: making head-scratching picks to show everyone they are the smartest guys in the room.
We simply cannot afford another disaster of a draft like 2025 or (excluding Bazzana) a slow developing class like 2024. But this is what the loss of that one pick has done, in addition to basically making the 3rd day of the draft really boring for the Guardians as they just try to finish their draft with a bunch of college organizational players who will sign for slot who they feel they can develop into something more but almost always can't.
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