SUMMARY
I think you can summarize the Guardians draft today in four bullets and a note:
1. They drafted Peterson, who is going to require some work to avoid being a bust. That being said, he was one of the top college pitchers in the draft. If they think they can get to his upside AND if they think he has a better chance to get to that upside than some other college pitchers in this draft, then I hope they are right.
2. They drafted a HS pitcher in the 2nd round. While he was a good value for the slot, value in the draft is only good if value in the major leagues is obtained. The Guardians are historically so bad at obtaining ML value from HS pitcher draftees you have to ask yourself if this was a good value pick or just a good window dressing pick. When you consider that Doughty is the only HS pitcher who they have recently drafted who looks like a sure major leaguer, color me unconvinced that this pick was the best resources.
3. Their next two picks were LHH slap hitters. Did they not learn how fruitless that was from Lampe, Furman, Hawke, Knapczyk and others they recently drafted in the top 5 rounds? High floor, extremely low ceiling. Not good!
4. All 4 of their picks today were very young for their class. That sounds like trying to show you are the smartest guys in the draft. Here is a thought. Some of the proposals for the next CBA involve free agency after 5 ML seasons and arbitration for everyone after 2 seasons. Thus, by drafting young guys, we could be paying these guys when they are very young and losing them another year before their prime if these rules go through. Both of these are exacerbated by drafting younger than average guys.
NOTE: Had we had our CB-A pick we could have had our choice of Taylor Rabe or Hunter Dietz with that pick to go with Peterson.
For comparison sakes, let's compare my last mock draft to this one:
#19: Me: Dietz (#17, went #35) Guardians: Liam Peterson *#20)
#59: Me: Ryan Peterson (went #71) Guardians: Logan Schmidt
#99: Me: Mass Yehl (went #91) Guardians: Tre Broussard
#123: Me Nathan Taylor (went #101) Guardians: Kade Lewis
So my draft was blow up early as Yehl and Taylor were snatched before I could get them.
CONCLUSION
Frankly, I don't know where they go from here. They are in the middle of the top 10 rounds now and this has been increibily unproductive over the past 3 years because of stupid draft strategies like LH slap hitters and pitchers who are way overdrafted.
Let's hope they can pull their collective heads out of their butts and actually come up with a good draft strategy that will be successful for the next 16 rounds because, right now, this draft is very, very underwhelming and discouraging to me. Not that it is bad, just that it has a better than average chance to turn out bad and it is based on a failed premise that LH slap hitters will work as a strategy and that we can develop HS pitching prospects into productive major leaguers. The only group that we have shown the ability to develop is college pitchers and we only drafted one of them in 4 rounds. So, no, I don't want any Aiden Majros, Dylan DeLucias, etc. tomorrow. I don't want any more hit-over-power college hitters. And I doubt that there are any quality college pitchers left.
So where does that leave us? I don't know but I know that our history in these rounds suck and, somehow, these idiots need to figure out how to save this draft from turning out like 2022, 2023, 2024 and, maybe (time will tell) 2025.
At leaset the Guardians won today because their draft room didn't, repeating the same things they have failed at in the recent past.
No comments:
Post a Comment