Draft Day Diary: Day Two

As I should have predicted, Jared Kelley was selected just minutes before our pick came up. Surprise, surprise. The good news is that we ended up with the guy we had identified from the beginning as our #1 pick: Luis Rodriguez. Unfortunately for Luis, he joins some pretty sketchy company. Our history of making good picks in the first round of the winter farm draft is abysmal, dating all the way back to our epic disastrous pick of Adam Johnson in 2001.

Since that pick, our #1 picks have been: Chris Burke, Jeremy Brown, Brent Clevlen, Jake Stevens, Chris Marrero, Dellin Betances, Eric Hosmer, A.J. Pollock, Nick Castellanos, Kyle Parker, Joe Panik, Hiroyuki Nakajima, Stephen Piscotty, Phil Bickford, Byung-Ho Park, J.B. Bukauskas, and Yusei Kikuchi. Not a star in the lot, and only four or five useful players out of eighteen.

We may kick ourselves down the road for not taking Mick Abel instead of Rodriguez. Abel and Kelley are pretty much #1 and #1(a) in the prep class this year. We just really like the upside of Rodriguez. Time will tell, as they say.

Our #2 pick came quickly. That choice came down to lefty college hurler Garrett Crochet or 16-year-old Alexander Mojica. We just learned of Mojica through an article in Baseball America. Figuring that others have probably read the same article, and since we already have several college pitchers in our system, we went with Mojica. Maybe he's the next Fernando Tatis. Or maybe he's just another Dominican League aberration.

In the auction, we decided to put a $17 million bid on deGrom. That is our max bid, regardless of what happens. The question was: do we place the bid early or wait until the last minute? Given that we believe deGrom will go for more than $17 million, it doesn't really matter. It's quite possible that someone will bid over $17 million for the sole purpose of keeping him off our roster. I'm okay with that.

As for Canha, I'm throwing in the towel. $5.5 million is a great price for him. $6M, or even $6.5M, would be a great price. But I just can't seem to fit him into our budget, and I'm not convinced that he will be a $6.5M (or $7.5M) player two years from now at age 33.

So now we wait. It would be a complete shock if we win the bid on deGrom. I fully expect him to be signed by Chris Luhning of the Law Dogs. Chris will then win 90+ games with deGrom, and then trade him next winter, freeing $17+ million in cash. He does it every single year.

Our focus then turns to Max Scherzer, who heads lot #2. I'm hesitant to bid $17 million on Scherzer, given his age and (especially) his lopsided splits. We'll see how that goes. Yelich then leads the next lot. Although it would be tremendous to add Yelich to our lineup, he doesn't fill a pressing need for us.