Yet Another 100% Accurate and Overly Informative Draft Preview Spectacular!
There R (Going to Be New) Giants!
Photo Credit: Leon Neuschwander | The Oregonian/OregonLive
This Draft Preview is a There R Giants Free For All, so if you like what you see, by all means subscribe for more There R Giants content!
It’s that time of year again! Because All Star Game Festivities and the signature showcase for prospects aren’t enough of a pileup in a single week, MLB has added the Amateur Draft as a virtual cherry on top to this All Things MLB week!
With the Draft coming Sunday night (just after the Futures Game is concluded), it’s time to get you ready with a preview, post-view, every which way-view of Giants’ drafting habits that will conclude with a lock solid, money-back-guarantee* prediction of the Giants’ precise first pick in this year’s draft!
*it’ll be coming out of a Monopoly box, but I’ll send it to you if you want!
The time is now! Let’s get ready to welcome some new Giants to the fold!
First the deets. As has been the case for several years, the MLB draft takes place over three days.
When: July 17, at 7pm EST; July 18, at 2pm EST; July 19, at 2pm EST
Where: Los Angeles
TV: MLB Network (first 80 picks) and ESPN (first round)
How Long: 20 rounds total
After boomeranging from 40 rounds in 2019 down to just five in 2020, and back up to 20 in 2021 — it looks like we’re staying at a 20 round draft for the foreseeable future. Every pick has an assigned pick slot value, and the overall bonus pool that a team accumulates from its full slate of picks has a lot to do with their strategy. Teams that have lots of picks, high picks, or lots of picks including high picks tend to have very large bonus pools that leave room for a lot of creative decisions on draft days. Teams that few picks and low picks have less flexibility of approach. That would include your Giants. Their 107 win season in 2021 gives them the very last pick in each round and they have no compensatory picks from outgoing free agents this year (Kevin Gausman accepted a qualifying offer prior to the 2021 season, and players cannot be extended qualifying offers two years in a row, so he signed his $100 million contract with no compensation attached to it.)
Consequently, the Giants’ bonus pool of $5,793,200 is the second lowest total of any club’s entering the draft. One of the fascinating subplots — for a Giants’ fan — for this year’s draft will be if that low bonus pool affects the strategy we’ve seen the team run in all three drafts since Farhan Zaidi took over the team’s direction. For the past three years, the Giants’ tendency has been to take a college player with their top pick, sign them to a below slot savings, and then use that savings to sway high school picks away from campus lower in the draft. It’s a “more pecks at the apple” strategy. Sometimes they’ve spread those under slot savings around — as they did in 2019, when the savings from Hunter Bishop, Logan Wyatt, and Tyler Fitzgerald in the top four rounds allowed them to go modestly overslot on a group of high school players (Grant McCray, Garrett Frechette, Dilan Rosario, and Trevor McDonald). Sometimes, they bundle all of the underslot savings together on one big, prestige purchase, the way they did in 2020, when Kyle Harrison was swayed from heading to UCLA with a $2.5 million dollar bonus — way, way overslot for a third round pick.
But whether they’re spreading the savings around evenly like peanut butter or piling it high like a Dagwood sandwich, the consistent tack has been to grab a college player at the top and save some money. That’s easier to do, of course, when you’re picking 10th (Bishop), 13th (Patrick Bailey), or 14th (Will Bednar). By the time you get down to pick number 30, the savings that can be gleaned from a pick have thinned a bit. The current draft is built for exactly this strategy, with slot values for picks near the top dramatically decompressed. As you get past the top 5, 10, 15 picks, those slot values compress more and more, until the difference between them is razor thin. You’ll often hear people argue that tanking in baseball isn’t really a viable strategy, because it’s much harder to determine who the best talent is in a baseball draft. That misses the point — in fact, it nearly steps on the actual point in its failure to see it lying there.
Teams have historically tanked, not so they could get a specific player at #1, but rather so they could get the #1 pick’s slot value, which has a much clearer degree of separation. The difference between the #1 and #2 picks this year is more than $700,000. The difference between the #1 and #4 picks this year is $1.8 million! With that additional bonus pool, a lot of talented young high school players can be tempted away from college with picks in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and even lower rounds.
However, despite this overall trend, the game has, for years, been moving away from the mass of high school draftees, preferring most of them to get their seasoning (and remove the odd scouting questions) at four year schools before making the investment plunge. My friend Scott over at Down on the Farm has created a ton of great visuals from draft data lately, and one of them shows this long term trend very clearly:
This has been going on too long to put your finger on any one explanation. But the beginning of the long term drop does fit neatly enough to the early 2000s publication of “Moneyball” to note that there’s correlation with the analytical skepticism of high school talents expressed (strongly — and often wrongly) in that book by Billy Beane. As more analytical tools of evaluation have become available to front offices this century, they’ve looked more and more at track records (because the data has shown pretty conclusively that track records of success have predictive value).
That’s not to suggest that only analytical clubs have been cutting down on the high school draftees. The Giants actually have a very long record of preferring college players that goes back decades — and past many farm directors. There were years in the 20th century when the Giants had no rookie league or short season clubs and that many have helped drive their preference for older players whose game was already somewhat refined. It’s not at all surprising to me that they place very low on this graphic — if it stretched back to the ‘80s, I don’t think their placement would change much:
Speaking of rookie leagues, when the minors were reorganized and short season ball was eliminated — many in the industry voiced the opinion that this will increase this overall trend, as the short season environment was vital to helping younger players refine their game before being ready for the jump to full season ball. Interestingly, you can see that 2020 was a notable exception to the long term trend, as the COVID pandemic caused a major disruption in tracking college players.
So you have, essentially, two ongoing trends that give the draft more and more of a character — the very top high school talents (particularly the most physically gifted) are scooped up either at the top of the 1st round or in large overslot bonuses over the following rounds, while the rest are sent to college to develop for a few years.
Let’s return, then, to the Giants’ recent draft strategy, which fits neatly into these long-term trends. Their “more bites at the apple” philosophy has, the last three years, preferred a college guy at the top followed by one or more overslot high school picks in later rounds. There’s room for reasonable minds to disagree here. I have always tended to the philosophy that the most important part of a draft is to maximize value in the highest pick, and the following chart suggests why that’s a good approach to the draft:
Historically, value is tightly packed at the very top of the draft and it declines like a coastal shelf into a very deep sea (in this metaphor, the “deep sea” is a dark hole, largely devoid of value — in reality the deep sea is a wondrous and magical place! So much for metaphors).
However, it’s hard to argue with the Giants’ strategy when you see how the results have played out so far (understanding that we’re still very early in the development process for these three drafts).
While Bishop has had various setbacks in attempting to turn his estimable physical gifts into consistent game skills, McCray, his third round compliment, has taken some big steps forward this year (it’s not that hard to imagine that had he gone to college, McCray might be in play for the Giants at the #30 pick this year). Frechette and McDonald have started to round into form this year as well. Bailey has stubbed his toe in surprising ways, but Harrison (signed to a first round equivalent bonus) is a shooting star. Bednar’s debut season has had setbacks, but buy-low bounceback candidate Mason Black and another well over slot high school arm, Eric Silva, both are surging. More bites at the apple absolutely helps defray some of the natural risk of the draft process in such a hard to predict industry (which is why Jim Callis’ economics degree son is such a fierce adherent of the strategy, as Jim has mentioned on the podcast a couple of times).
I think that strategy also explains a potentially surprising graphic that Scott came up with, when he looked at shorter term drafting behaviors. When the timeframe covers just the three years over Zaidi’s regime, the Giants position in the “high school draftees” chart changes significantly:
Whoa! This is surprising — the Giants have drafted the third MOST high school players over the last three years?
True, but context is crucial here. Of the 17 high school players that the Giants have drafted over the past three years, they’ve signed just eight, and only five were selected in the top 10 rounds (this is important — I’ll get to why in a second). The nine high school picks who went unsigned were all late Day 3 picks, taken after the 25th round, knowing they were unlikely to sign.
Why would they take players they didn’t think would sign, you ask? Well, that makes this a good place to stop and talk about the mechanics of the draft bonus pool. As I said, each and every pick in the draft has an assigned “slot value,” but these are not “hard slots” — teams can move their overall bonus pool money around as they see fit (thus $2.5 million bonus for a third round pick in Harrison, etc.). However, there is a catch to team’s ability to move that money around as they see fit: if any player selected in the top 10 rounds does not end up signing — the full slot value for that pick disappears from their bonus pool.
This answers the question that I know some of you have — if the Giants value a player like Harrison as a 1st rounder, why don’t they pick him there? The loss of slot value helps explain this. Teams generally check with players or their representatives to try to find acceptable numbers to both sides before calling their name at the podium (shocking, I know), but deals aren’t deals until they’re signed, so there is some degree of uncertainty with these picks. A player like Harrison, who can bring the leverage of his commitment to UCLA to the bargaining sessions, might ultimately decide to walk away from the final offer (this doesn’t happen often, but it does happen). If that happens, losing the value of the third round pick (in the case of the Giants’ 2020 3rd round pick, that was $710,700) is much less of a hit to the overall draft class than losing the entire value of the first round pick ($4,197,300 in that 2020 case). Losing $700k from your bonus pool is something teams can recover from — losing $4.2m is a body blow that would have significant domino effects on a team’s ability to sign their other players.
So, back to those unsigned high school picks. Teams that use this “underslot/overslot” strategy, typically take late round flyers, whom they might pivot to, if they fail to reach a deal with some of their targets in the top 10 rounds. From the 11th round on, each pick is assigned a value of $125,000, and while the money spent in those rounds counts against teams’ overall bonus pools, no money is lost from that pool if players go unsigned. In the late rounds, teams will target some less likely signings, with the thought that if a couple of other picks don’t come to agreement (say, McCray and Frechette in 2019), they can use what available underslot savings remain on some Hail Mary attempts to sway these unlikely signings from college. They’re safety nets, essentially.
And, for what it’s worth, the Giants have targeted some pretty good value with those safety net picks. They took Brooks Lee with the 35th round pick in 2019. It was widely known that Lee wanted to go to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo to play for his father, the Mustangs longtime head coach. Lee did indeed fulfill that wish — and unfortunately he proceeded to play himself out of the Giants’ range for 2022. He’s likely to go in the top 10 picks on Sunday night. Last year, the Giants took high schooler Vance Honeycutt with their 20th and final round pick. Honeycutt headed to the University of North Carolina and put up a 25 HR/25 SB season as a true freshman this year. You just know that Michael Holmes wants to get his hands on Honeycutt again — though once again, he might play his way out of the Giants’ picking range in two more years (assuming the Giants can play winning ball next year!)
A different example comes from high school pick McDonald, whom the Giants did sign. While McDonald ended up inking for $797,500 (the third highest bonus the Giants handed out that year), the Giants waited until the 11th round to select him, indicating that they had some pretty strong questions as to whether they’d be able to sign him or not. McDonald was, if I recall correctly, the final signing they announced that summer.
And with all that preamble hopefully clarifying some of the Giants’ thinking entering this draft, let’s get to the real question:
Who Are They Going to Take?
Yes, yes, you’ve been patient enough!
While the 2022 draft is dominated at the very top by an elite group of high school players (there’ s a chance that we could see an all time record tonight for consecutive high school picks at the top of the draft), there’s a big group of proven college performers who provide a lot of value from that 15-50 range. Most of these guys are hitters, as the college pitching crop was devastated by injuries this spring.
As I look into my crystal ball, I’m mostly eliminating that pool of injured college pitchers. There are some very good ones that you’ll hear called on Sunday night in the first round — and more who will be selected on Monday night. But I’m skeptical that the Giants will go that direction, especially after their bumper crop of pitchers taken in the 2021 draft. Pitcher injuries increase risk and increase questions, and I think the Giants have shown that they prefer some safety in that top pick (I say some — obviously the performance of their last three picks shows that there is simply no such thing as real “safety” in these picks). Yes, maybe things chase if Kumar Rocker somehow slides to 30, or high schooler Dylan Lesko, who was certain to be the top pitcher selected in this draft before undergoing Tommy John surgery, but I’m crossing this entire phylum off of my list.
I think they’re most likely going to be looking at a group of college outfielders, at least some of whom should be on the board when they select at 30. These guys include:
Drew Gilbert, OF, University of Tennessee, .314/.400/.534 (career)
Gilbert is coming off a fantastic Junior season that could arguably be called the best all around performance among D1 hitters this year. As such, teams that model based on track records have really been pushing him up the board as we get closer and closer to D-Day. A huge bevy of high ceiling high school players will no doubt dominate the top 10 on Sunday, but Gilbert is not likely to be far behind, with the action on him probably starting in the mid-teens, and the possibility existing of some team tagging him as a real underslot value and taking him well above that level.
If, by some accumulation of events, he ends up sliding to 30, Gilbert seems like a perfect match for the Giants. Beyond the production slash line, the advanced data paints a picture of a hitter who does all of the things the Giants value. He clusters his swings in the strike zone. His swing rate for his Junior year was just 41%, but he swung at 69% of pitches in the zone. And when he swings, he doesn’t miss that often, with a solid 11% whiff rate in the zone. That is even better when he’s swinging at fastballs — he whiffed on just 10% of the fastballs he swung at this year. Gilbert makes good swing decisions, doesn’t chase a lot, puts the ball in the air (45% ground ball rate), and produces reasonably good exit velocity (109 max EV this year). He has an all around performance records and can play some CF. He would be perfect for the Giants if he weren’t also perfect for many of the other like-thinking clubs that pick before them.
Jacob Melton, OF, Oregon State, .364/.428/.660
Melton (pictured at the top) strikes me as the perfect sweet spot of high value, proven track record, and likelihood of being available at 30. In fact, there probably isn’t a single player in the draft who is as likely to be on the board at 30 and brings such a long history of performance success as Melton. While he brings an unorthodox swing (which could knock him down some boards), there’s no denying it has worked for him. Melton mashed throughout his career at Oregon State, hitting .404 his sophomore season before a huge 17 HR, 1.094 OPS season in his junior year. He’s also fast enough to stick in center field and is a good athlete and base runner. There is some swing and miss in Melton’s game, but his whiff rates in the strike zone were a manageable 16%, while his chase rates were a solid 23%. He makes good swing decisions, gets the ball in the air, and hits the ball hard. He had a max exit velocity this year of 111 mph, and his 90th percentile EV was 105. For teams who like a decent level of certainty, track record, and athleticism, it’s hard to do better than Melton. And he’s not a guy who’s going to be holding out for over slot deals at the back of the 1st round (that’s true of all the players I’ll mention here).
And, hey, Tim Lincecum was Pac 12 Player of the Year once upon a time. Just saying!
Chase DeLauter, OF, James Madison University, .402/.520/.715
(yes, you read that right!)
DeLauter is another wild card in this draft. Coming out of a sensational Cape Cod campaign last summer, DeLauter seemed headed for the top of the 1st round. But he stumbled slightly in the early spring, with a rough series at Florida State that included a lot of swing and miss. While he recovered quickly from that misstep, he broke his foot as he was getting rolling and missed most of the spring. The series at FSU left an outsized mark on his draft status, since he plays at a small school and often faces a lower level of competition. Still, DeLauter is highly valued by teams that rely on models for their drafting (which includes the Giants) AND by teams that value control of the strike zone (like the Giants!). He walked more than he struck out over his college career (by a lot — 62 to 45), and the exit velocities he posted on the Cape were elite, showing top of the line raw power.
It’s highly unlikely that DeLauter will make it to the Giants at 30, but if he does, I don’t think he’ll make it past them (I mean, unless Gilbert is ALSO there — but that seems really unlikely).
Spencer Jones, OF, Vanderbilt University, .329/.418/.524
If DeLauter is a wild card, then Jones is a fully fledged “Joker! Joker! Joker!” slot machine. If you look at the various outlets rankings for this draft class, you can find Jones slotted much lower than the 30-range where the Giants will be picking. I’ve seen him ranked as low as the 60s in just the last week. But there are also persistent rumors attaching him to teams in the back half of the 1st round, including the Yankees and the Giants.
The disparity isn’t that hard to understand, the 6’7” Jones is probably the most unique physical specimen in this draft. Comparisons to Aaron Judge are impossible to avoid for these enormous outfielders — and that’s probably driving some of the sentiment that keeps putting Jones with the Yankees in mock drafts. But while a player of that size tromping around outfields was completely unprecedented when Judge was coming out of Fresno State (ultimately going off the board at the 32nd pick of the 2013 draft), with Judge’s success, and the more recent impact of the similarly unicorn sized Oneil Cruz, teams are paying less attention to the natural swing and miss that those long, LONG levers create, focusing instead on what those long levers can do: generate an incredible amount of force on the ball. Big guys have holes, for sure, but they can hit the damn ball really damned hard! And that’s certainly true of Jones, who produced the top exit velocities in this class, topping out at 116 with an incredible 110 mph 90th percentile exit velocity. And there’s good reason to believe that Jones is just scratching the surface of his power. He was a two-sport athlete who excelled at football as well as baseball for much of his young career. And, of course, as he’s barely turned 21, he’s likely to still be in the gangly giraffe phase of growing into his body. This is a high upside, big swing of the bat (unlike the relatively high floor picks that Melton or Gilbert would represent), but though he might be considered a high risk pick, the exit velocity data provides solid metrics to join with the high grades on his scouting report. That keeps him within the rubric of the Giants’ model-based decision making I think. Jones is also a California boy — not NorCal like Judge — but I’m sure he’d enjoy the prospects of spending most of his minor league career on the west coast.
Other Possibilities
There’s a very real possibility that all of the four players I’ve highlighted above could come off the board before the Giants pick. That could push them to a bigger tier of college OFs close enough to the above group to still provide real value. That includes a couple of NorCal guys, Cal OF Dylan Beavers and Stanford OF Brock Jones. Both of these guys are extremely athletic, tooled up types who can fly and have big power. Jones even red-shirted on the Stanford football team his freshman year, before turning to baseball full time. But both come with some hit tool questions that knock them down slightly behind some of the higher floor types like Gilbert. I think they both might end up being more corner bats than true CF types, as well. In that light, they’re both somewhat similar to Bishop, in terms of pure athletic tools and big power and speed, combined with a hit tool risk. Still, both are typically ranked right in that 30-40 range and should come off the board right around the Giants pick or shortly thereafter.
Others who fit in this same category include Florida’s OF Sterlin Thompson and Gilbert’s Volunteer teammate Jordan Beck, who is toolsier than Gilbert but not as polished. If I’ve stuffed you with all of this outfield talent, one non-outfielder who fits in the same “college performer” bucket who could possibly be available is Oklahoma shortstop Peyton Graham, a lanky right-handed batter who has done nothing but hit since stepping onto campus. He’s projected to hear his name in the back of the 1st round and would be excellent value at pick 30, but I have a hard time believing a proven college hitter at an up-the-middle position actually gets that far.
A Different Direction
Ok, let’s say I’m wrong with this whole “expect a college hitter” notion. I don’t think I am! But history tells me it’s a distinct possibility (being wrong every single year for decades doesn’t really constitute a trend, does it?). Here’s a couple of names you might hear if the Giants go a different direction at 30.
Robby Snelling, LHP, McQueen HS, Reno, NV
Giants National Cross Checker Brian Bridges has had a lot of success in his career drafting high school pitchers — mainly for the Braves during his run of their draft war rooms in the last decade, but also with the Giants in picks like Harrison and Silva. Bridges has often declared his preference for polish in high schoolers over big stuff that plays at showcases, and the success of Harrison certainly backs up that philosophy. Snelling has absolutely dominated his Nevada high school contemporaries with a strong feel for his craft, an ability to throw strikes, and an excellent curve. He’s a high helium player who does push a lot of Bridges’ buttons. Baseball America has mocked Snelling to the Giants’ in their final Mock Draft (published yesterday). Snelling would be a similar pick in some respects to Harrison, but with the Giants working with a much smaller bonus pool, it might be hard to sign him this year. The fact that he’s another somewhat local kid can’t hurt, as the Giants have prioritized drafting local, as well.
Jackson Ferris, LHP, IMG Academy, Bradenton, FL
Ferris is similar in many ways to Snelling, but his helium came a little earlier, as he experienced an early velocity spike that saw him hitting 96-97 last summer, while still showing a feel for his craft. And instead of being in the NorCal diaspora (yes, I’ve drafted you into NorCal, Reno!), Ferris comes from the home ground of both Bridges (who lives in Georgia) and Draft Director Michael Holmes. In fact, though Ferris is graduating out of one of the premier baseball academies in Florida (one of his teammates, Elijah Green, is expected to go in the top 5-6 picks of this year’s draft), Ferris is actually from Mt. Airy, NC — growing up practically in Holmes’ back yard. You can draw enough connections here to see a natural attraction for the Giants, but again, the question of whether the bonus pool is sufficient to keep him from heading to campus is valid.
Tucker Toman, INF, Hammond HS, Columbia, SC
You may recognize Tucker Toman’s name — like Ferris, Toman’s name came up in my podcast with Carlos Collazo, when I asked him to pick one player from each of the four “quadrants” of the draft. Toman was his pick for a potential high school hitter that might be attractive at #30. It sounds like Toman has been moving up boards since then, potentially being attractive to teams as high as #20 instead. He’s a bat first high school guy who is somewhat similar to picks we’ve seen in the back half of the first round the last few years — Boston’s surprise selection of Nick Yorke in 2020 was a very comparable pick, for instance. I don’t actually believe the Giants would turn in Toman’s direction were he available, given the plethora of more experienced hitters they’ll have to choose from, AND I don’t really think he’ll be available at 30. So, double whammy here. Don’t expect to hear Toman’s name.
And there you have it! My absolutely, positively guaranteed pick of precisely (more or less) which name you’ll hear the Giants take with the last pick of the 1st round.
Unless, of course, I’m totally wrong again. But that could never happen, right?
One thing’s for certain: whoever they select on draft day, the Giants really do need to develop into a major league talent. Because this here — this is a trend that has to be broken if the organization is to stave off long-term talent issues:
This Draft Preview is a There R Giants Free For All, so if you like what you see, by all means subscribe for more There R Giants content!
Let’s hear it — who are you folks hoping for?
"However, there is a catch to team’s ability to move that money around as they see fit: if any player selected in the top 10 rounds does not end up signing — the full slot value for that pick disappears from their bonus pool." and "losing the value of the third round pick (in the case of the Giants’ 2020 3rd round pick, that was $710,700) is much less of a hit to the overall draft class than losing the entire value of the first round pick ($4,197,300 in that 2020 case)." This is such a great answer to the mystery of why Harrison lasted to the third round.
Well, I *was* hoping for Melton - until I saw the video of Jackson Ferris. I guess I’m inordinately fond of drafting HS pitchers (still looking at you, Mick Abel). So I’m really following Harrison, McDonald, and Silva. But a LHH college outfielder would be pretty sweet, too.
So maybe I’ll be easy to please this year - how weird. Spencer Jones would probably be my least favorite of all the guys you listed.