2023 Draft

bling said:

The LSU commit is a Hail Mary according to Flores. The Cards came into it with a smaller pool because of no second round pool money. But they also don’t have to spend anything signing that pick. They should save something signing all the seniors, so there should be some amount of dry powder.

Folks can see more of Flores’ comments in our draft articles on the home page. That includes Hail Mary and comments about the dynamics of signing seniors, which is a question I asked him directly.

Most of the seniors (five) were taken on Day 3, so that wouldn’t save any money that could be used on the Top 10 round guys.

They seemed to like pitchers who have trouble with the strike zone. Maybe they’re moving from pitchability to chuck-n-duck types.

I don’t see any McCormick type wild pitchers they took, all of those look fairly reasonable on innings pitched to walks issued, some look pretty good except for Odie and Brandt who threw 30 innings b/w themselves.

For reference….Mark McCormick was a pitcher from Baylor they took in the 1st or 2nd round of the 2005 draft who couldn’t find the strike zone in college and had the same issues in the minors.

Maybe a K/W measure is a better ratio?

Maybe so bccran, but I think there are different schools of thought, which seem to wax and wane in popularity. Sometimes its pitch to contact and sometimes its missing bats. A K/BB ratio that is acceptable to one school might not be to another. But it seems like whichever school of thought, more strike outs and less walks would be better than vice versa.

My view is I like guys who can throw strikes. I would start with that. My reasoning goes like this. Everybody in MLB can hit 99 MPH now days. To make the 99 effective you have to have effective secondary pitches and pitch sequencing to keep them guessing, and you have to have good enough control consistently to throw enough strikes but not catch too much plate. But if you possess all those attributes, then you don’t have to throw 99 to get guys out, so there is no point focussing your attention on that.

So, we’ll know how we did in this draft in 2-3 years.

I guess the logical question would be, how are our 2019 and 2020 picks looking overall as a ‘grade’?

2018 was good too: Gorman, Baker, Donovan, Nootbaar. Some big misses too.

Scott Hurst from 2017 made it the big leagues briefly. Appeared in 5 games in 2021.

He’s only counting significant contributions. Kramer Robertson and Kodi Whitley have also made it to the majors from that 2017 class. But none spent much time there. Whitley has made the most contribution.

We seem to like having two guys with same first names. At times we have had two, sometimes three Adam’s, Tyler’s, Jordan’s, Paul’s, Nolan’s and probably a couple others. Now we could see two Chases’s someday.