The 2013 amateur draft will be held from June 6-8 this year, and between now and then I’m going to highlight some prospects individually rather than lump them together into larger posts.

Billy McKinney | OF

Background
A Texas kid out of Plano West High School, McKinney played for the Texas Scout Team Yankees last fall — the Yankees use the club to familiarize themselves with Texas high school prospects (2012 second rounder Austin Aune played for the squad a year ago) — and starred at the Perfect Game World Wood Bat Association World Championship in Florida back in November. He’s committed to TCU.

Scouting Report
McKinney, who is listed at 6-foot-1 and 195 lbs., stands out for his offensive potential from the left side of the plate. He consistently gets the fat part of the bat on the ball thanks to his smooth and easy left-handed swing. McKinney is a line drive gap-to-gap hitter with some power potential, and the hitting tools all play up because of his advanced approach. He’s one of the best pure hitters in the draft class, high school or college.

Although he plays center field in high school and shows good speed with an okay arm, McKinney might end up in a corner outfield spot down the line as he fills out and slows down. Regardless, his bat is his calling card and the reason teams are looking at him prior to the draft. Here’s some more video. Love that swing.

Miscellany
Baseball America (subs. req’d) ranked McKinney as 23rdth best prospect in the class in today’s updated rankings while Keith Law (subs. req’d) had him 27th last month. He looks to be very much in that late-first round/supplemental round mix at the moment, and we know he’s on the Yankees’ radar since he played for their Texas Scout Team just a few months ago. The Yankees love pure high school hitters like J.R. Murphy and Tyler Austin even if their position is unsettled, so McKinney sure seems like someone they could target with one of their top three picks (26th, 32nd, 33rd).

Mark Appel remains the favorite to go first overall. (AP)

Given their newfound austerity and the fact that more and more star players are signing long-term extensions, the farm system will be more important for the Yankees going forward than it ever was before. If they plan to remain competitive year after year — I don’t expect those intentions to change, they are the Yankees after all — they’ll need a deep and steady pipeline of young prospects to plug into the roster and trade for established big leaguers.

Because of the way the most recent Collective Bargaining Agreement changed the system, the Yankees are going to have to simply out-scout and out-develop other teams. They will never have access to top amateur talent as long as they remain competitive, so finding those diamonds in the rough and turning them into useful players will be extra important going forward. I’m not very confident the current regime can actually do that, but they have made some player development changes in recent years — most notably re-hiring pitching coordinator Gil Patterson — so maybe things will change. We’ll see.

When writing about the draft in recent years, in tended to put together posts focusing on prospects who were grouped together somehow. High school bats, players with good makeup, pitchers who had success in the Cape Cod League … whatever. They were almost always players I liked for whatever reason. I want to get away from that this spring and instead highlight individual players who fit what appears to be the Yankees’ draft philosophy. That means players with good makeup, athletic high school position players, hard-throwing college arms, and big-framed high school pitchers.

I still have my personal favorites and I’m sure I’ll wind up writing about those guys as well, but I plan to pump out shorter player profiles like this one I did last year for outfielder Ty Moore last spring. The Yankees wound up drafting him in the later rounds but did not sign him. Those shorter posts make it easier to be a little more specific and provide more information about a player while also being easier to reference in the future. Plus there will be more of them; instead of one big post every so often there will be smaller posts regularly. I dunno, maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like getting away from group posts of four of five players in favor of more short, individual player posts is more informative and enjoyable. At least it is on my end.

Anyway, the Yankees have three relatively high picks and a lot of draft pool money available this year. It will also be their last chance to add multiple high-end prospects to the farm system with a single draft for a while. They don’t really have any qualifying offer-worth players on the roster scheduled to become free agents in the next few years (outside of Robinson Cano, obviously), so they’re stuck with the picks they have. The draft will be fun this season as fans thanks to those three high picks, but its importance to the club can not be overstated. They need to bring in quality and quantity this year.