The Pittsburgh Pirates will have their highest first round pick in the June amateur draft since they took Austin Meadows with the ninth overall pick in 2013. The Pirates have the 12th selection this year. They have a large bonus pool due to the high first round pick, a compensation pick for not signing 41st overall pick Nick Lodolo last year, plus a competitive balance pick after the second round. With four picks on day one of the draft, plus that large bonus pool, it’s a good year for the Pirates to stock up on high-end talent.
Every year we provide coverage leading up to the draft, focusing in on the potential targets of the Pirates with their top picks. The Pirates seemed to be developing a pattern over the last few years. They stocked up on athletic players with the hit tool. Their thinking was that it’s easier to teach a good hitter how to field, than it is to teach a glove-first player how to hit. That led to picks like Austin Meadows, Adam Frazier, Kevin Newman, Cole Tucker, Ke’Bryan Hayes, Kevin Kramer, Connor Joe and Jordan Luplow near the top. Sometimes those players had to go to a new position, but they were athletic enough that the Pirates thought they could handle the move.
So going into the 2016 draft, it appeared we had a target to focus in on with our draft coverage. While we mentioned Will Craig often because he was always rated around the spot the Pirates picked, his lack of athleticism made him seem like an unlikely pick. In fact, no one from the 2016 draft for the Pirates actually fit the athletic player with the hit tool mold. That leaves us back to square one with our focus in this upcoming draft, so we will cover anyone who could possibly be a 12th overall pick. We won’t eliminate anyone early on, but some of the players currently at the top of the class will cement their spot and turn into wishful thinking for Pirates fans.
As for this current draft class, it appears to be heavy with college talent at the top, then a lot of high school players who currently fit in the mid-to-late first round. You’ll notice that our coverage will be somewhat college heavy early on, which happens for two reasons. The first is that it’s much easier to find info on college players, while the second reason is that high school seasons are much shorter and usually start later. Some prep teams in colder weather states don’t begin play until April.
In their list of the top 350 prospects, D1Baseball noted the strength of pitchers at the top, saying there seems to be potential impact talent and this could be a better class than last year. Going by their rankings, they also like the strength of this class at shortstop. The Pirates have taken shortstops within the first three rounds in each of the last three years. You can even go back longer if you include JaCoby Jones in 2013, who was put at shortstop after being drafted, and Wyatt Mathisen in 2012, who played shortstop in high school before moving to catcher. They both fit that athletic mold the Pirates were looking for early on in the draft. Players who had a quality bat, and multiple options for their position. So finding a shortstop on day one seems like a possibility.
MLB Pipeline has their list of the top 50 draft prospects, and they also have 14 pitchers among their top 20. They have five shortstops in their top 50 and three full-time catchers, along with Hagen Danner, who is a prep catcher with above average defense, who also has the arm to be a first round pick as a pitcher. I originally intended to do a brief write-up on their 12th overall player, a high school shortstop from Florida named Brady McConnell. I decided against that after I saw most other sources had him ranked much lower. He is an athletic middle infielder who profiles to stick at shortstop, so you will hear the name again during our coverage.
Baseball America puts out a split list, breaking it up into the top 100 players in college and top 100 in high school. That makes it harder to see right now what they consider to be the strength of this class, but you can look at each list to see which positions rank near the top. The college list is top-heavy with pitching, including some pitchers from past coverage. They have J.B. Bukauskas ranked third, Brendan McKay fourth and Tristan Beck sixth.
Bukauskas jumped quickly up the draft charts in 2014 by hitting 100 MPH, then asked to not be drafted so he could go to college. McKay is a local Pennsylvania kid who put up a long shutout streak in 2014 and had people asking Neal Huntington if the Pirates would put an emphasis on him since he was a local kid. Beck was covered during the 2015 draft and now he’s an eligible sophomore at Stanford. Both Bukauskas and McKay threw six shutout innings on Friday night. Bukauskas was consistently hitting 96 MPH and he picked up ten strikeouts.
BA’s high school list has a nice mix of players representing every position among the top 31 rated players. Usually spots like first base, second base and sometimes catcher can be lacking, because the best players in high school usually play premium positions on their team. While you never draft to fill holes, there isn’t a position that looks weak right now. The Pirates took some high-end talent among high school pitchers in 2016 and very early on it looks like they made some solid selections, so that could be an area they focus in on again to really strengthen the pitching pipeline.
Right now it appears the main focus of the draft coverage early on will be college pitchers, but once we start getting some mock drafts and an idea of who is around that 12th pick, we will get a better focus. The Pirates haven’t signed a college pitcher in the first three rounds since Gerrit Cole in 2011, but this seems like a year it’s possible. You have four picks on the first day and a clear strength to the draft class. The draft begins on June 12th and runs for three days, with rounds 3-10 on day two, and 11-40 on the final day. As usual, we will have player pages for all 42 players they draft, plus a signing tracker, where we have been the first to break numerous signings.
Upcoming Draft Coverage
We use numerous sources for our draft coverage, but the mock drafts we post will come from the big sources because those are the ones that get the most interest. I always include mock drafts for some other sources as well, even if they don’t get their name in the title, they will make the notes section of an article. Last year we had subscriptions to Baseball America, D1Baseball, Prep Baseball Report and ESPN Insider (Keith Law) and that will continue this year, along with plenty of information coming from MLB Pipeline. In the last couple years, the first mock draft articles started in early April, then around early May they appeared more often.
The draft articles will include a recap of some weekly action, but the main focus of each article will be covering a specific player. We tend to focus in on players who are consistently placed near the Pirates in the mock drafts. Back in 2015, we mentioned Kevin Newman here multiple times, so people had an idea of who he was when he was drafted. Focusing in on individual players also led to us having some good info already on Ke’Bryan Hayes before the draft. Leading up to the draft, both players were mentioned multiple times within a few spots of the Pirates in mock drafts. Writing about each player will allow us to link back to their main article each time we mention a player, so you can see why they are someone of interest.
With the amount of players we cover, it’s possible we will inadvertently also mention a player the Pirates take with one of those other picks on the first day. The final article each year (except for last day mock drafts) is the popular tier article, where we break players down into groups based on everything we’ve read during the year. Those groups range from players who will likely be gone before the Pirates pick, to guys who will be a good fit at 12th overall, to players who are good fits for the third round pick, and everything in between.
Next Sunday we will have a weekend recap for the top college players and take a look at the top rated players in this draft class. Once more teams are playing and it gets a little closer to draft time, then we will expand the coverage to at least a couple articles a week, in addition to any articles covering mock drafts.
