Welcome to the first ever Day Three of the MLB Draft. Hard to believe that after two days and nearly 11 hours of drafting, there’s still 40% of this thing left to go. Here’s some links before the show gets on the road …
- Baseball America rounds up the best players still left on the board. Eight players from their top 200 draft prospects list are still available (seven high schoolers, one JuCo kid), the best being Jacksonville HS catcher Austin Maddox (#81). At this point, all of these guys are going to end up in school because no one will pay them the kind of money they want this late.
- Tenth overall pick Drew Storen became the first first rounder to officially sign this year, getting a $1.6M bonus from the Nats. Slot money for that pick was approximately $1.86M. Gotta save up that cash for Strasburg.
- The Indians are going to develop Alex White, the 15th overall pick, as a reliever. Epic front office fail.
- Keith Law gives his take on five teams’ drafts so far. He doesn’t mention the Yanks, but did have an interesting bit on the Pirates draft strategy; allow me to quote: “Their philosophy is that high school arms are so volatile that paying premium prices in the first round is a poor strategy, and that the value of that first pick (when you might get a premium bat or college arm) is too high to surrender, so try to stockpile young arms in later rounds.” It makes sense for a team like Pittsburgh to do this because they need all the talent they can get, but at some point you have to take a shot on guys with star potential early.
- Make sure you also check out yesterday’s KLawChat. More draft knowledge than you know what to do with.
- WIBW.com notes that Yanks’ 25th rounder Shaeffer Hall threw a no-hitter against Army earlier this year. The Black Knights weren’t a total pushover this year, finishing at 36-21, so that’s quite the accomplishment. Hall led the Big 12 Conference with a 0.97 BB/9 this season.
- The Daily Commercial has a bit on 15th rounder Shane Greene, who caught the Yanks’ eye during a workout after coming back from Tommy John surgery throwing harder than before.
- Great quote from New Mexico State catcher Jeff Farnham, the Yanks 27th round pick: “I know (the bonus) isn’t going to be much, maybe a couple of a grand and an airplane ticket to Florida. But I would play for free. I just want a fair chance.”
You can see all of the Yanks’ picks here. You can follow along the final twenty rounds with Draft Tracker when the draft resumes at 11:30. Liveblog will be along shortly.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.