Should be a fun night in the chat as the Twins look to win another series from a Central Division foe AND the MLB First-Year Player Draft is in full swing.
MLB.com is running live draft coverage over at their website, and all signs point towards the Twins drafting the toolsy high school outfielder Byron Buxton out of Georgia. Baseball America rates him as the best talent available in the 2012 draft and with the Twins unlikely to turn their team around in the immediate future, fans should not be concerned about the lengthy development time of a high schooler. After the #2 pick the Twins still have 4 more of the top 75 picks, and they will likely add a couple of college arms and then look for middle infield depth.
UPDATE: TWINS TAKE BYRON BUXTON WITH THE 2ND OVERALL PICK.
Oh, and here are the line ups for the game, which is being played tonight, not 3-5 years in the future (who would have thought: the Twins have 3 hitters hitting .280+ at the top of the line up and Joe Mauer has the day off to nurse his thumb):
Cole DeVries picked up his first Major League win by surviving five innings. He wasn’t great, but he also had some pretty erratic defense behind him at times. The bullpen came through yet again and the offense tagged Royals pitching for 10 runs on 12 hits.
Once again, there was no shortage of Boyfriend of the Day candidates. Josh Willingham, Justin Morneau and Trevor Plouffe went deep. But in the end, we’re going with co-BOD awards for Ben Revere (3 hits, 2 runs, 2 RBI, and a stolen base) and Jamey Carroll (3 hits and a walk in four trips to the plate including a triple, 2 runs, 2 RBI, and a stolen base). Those are some good numbers! – JC
To a certain small degree (very small, actually), I find the discussions about the MLB draft entertaining. Sure, it will be mildly interesting to see who the Twins draft with the #2 pick overall tonight in the first round of this year’s Amateur Draft and it will be much more entertaining to read the inevitable explosion of comments from the self-anointed “experts” in online Twinsville, all telling us how badly the Twins screwed up with their pick.
But, frankly, I just don’t care that much who they pick. Make that, I just don’t care AT ALL who they pick. Once the pick is made and the young man, whoever it is, signs with the Twins, then I’ll be interested in following his progress within the organization’s minor league system.
But all the people who are going on and on about how this pick is some kind of turning point for the organization or how they need to be drafting the next “face of the franchise” need to just take a chill pill. The MLB draft is a lot like playing roulette. There is absolutely no certainty that any specific draft pick will eventually even play in the Majors, much less become a star.
The first round is comparable to picking red or black on the roulette wheel. At best, you’ve got just below a 50-50 shot at your choice being a winner. After that, it becomes more like putting your money on increasingly smaller groups of numbers, making your odds longer and longer, until you get to the point where your chances of hitting on a late round pick are worse than just putting your hard-earned money on a single number on the wheel.
In fact, despite the draft going 50 rounds prior to this season, when it’s been cut to 40, you seem to see just about as many non-drafted players beating the odds as you do guys who were drafted pretty much anywhere outside the top few rounds.
For a case in point, let’s take a look at a couple of young pitchers that Twins fans may recognize.
Pitcher A was drafted not once, but twice. He was drafted in the 20th round by the Dodgers out of high school in 2006, but opted to pitch for a big-time college program. In 2009, he was drafted in the second round by the Twins.
Pitcher B is a year older than pitcher A, but was never drafted. After pitching for Binghamton University in NY, he signed a contract with Atlanta after his junior year of college in 2008. Just before the opening of the 2011 season, this young pitcher was traded to the Twins for Pitcher A.
Today, Pitcher A is sporting a not-too-nifty 1.714 WHIP for the Braves’ AA team in Mississippi, where he’s giving up 7.7 hits per nine innings and is walking an identical 7.7 batters per 9… which is actually more hitters than he’s striking out in each nine innings of work.
Sunday, Pitcher B pitched seven strong innings for the Twins without giving up any earned runs, dropping his ERA to below two earned runs per nine innings. His WHIP is 1.190 and while he’s giving up a few more hits than we might like to see (9.8 per 9 IP), he’s walking less than one hitter per 9.
Scott Diamond (Photo: Genevieve Ross/AP)
By now, pretty much everyone still bothering to read this knows I’m writing about Scott Diamond, who the Twins acquired in the Rule 5 draft before the 2011 season and subsequently traded second round draft pick Billy Bullock to the Braves for, in order to be able to send Diamond to the minors before the 2011 season started.
It’s still far too soon to tell what the future holds for these two young pitchers’ careers. Diamond is still 25 for a few weeks and Bullock turned just 24 earlier this year. They’re still young enough for us to debate “ceilings” and “potential” if we want to get in to a discussion about whether the trade was good or bad.
Billy Bullock (Photo: Tim Casey/GatorCountry.com)
It could also be argued that I’ve cherry-picked a bit to make this comparison… that there are just as many examples (and probably many more) available that would demonstrate that high draft picks are much more likely to contribute at the Major League level than players who were never drafted. I’ll plead guilty to the cherry-picking, too.
But my point is simply this… go ahead and follow the MLB draft tonight and over the next few days and feel free to express your views about how the Twins coulda-shoulda-woulda been better off drafting this guy over that guy. But realize that in the grand scheme of things, nobody has a friggin clue who the “right” picks are… and we won’t find out for years.
But hey, if you’re one of those people who really don’t mind watching the little silver ball go round and round the roulette wheel for 3-4 years before it lands, knock yourself out!
