00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hello, everybody. J.J. Cooper, Carlos Collazo, Baseball America Draft Podcast. We are rolling along in our series reviewing past drafts. And today we have gotten to the craziest of the crazy drafts, the 2020 draft. I feel like we will end up talking about the environment leading into this draft more than we do about any others, because this one is entirely different than any other draft that we've talked about so far. We do appreciate it. We've gotten a lot of good feedback that you all are enjoying these. We're glad to hear that. We enjoy doing them. But just jumping in, Carlos, so set the scene. I would say we're rolling along in the offseason coming into the 2020 draft and like, okay, there's some interesting guys in here. You know, can Spencer Torkelson set home run records at ASU? Who are the pitchers that are going to emerge? We had this early season, kind of breakout from Max Meyer, I would say up at a tournament in the in, in Minnesota, you know, and the Homer don't basically, if I remember correctly, right. And, and then it all just stopped. And, and then we did end up having a draft, but we didn't know when we're gonna have a draft, we didn't know what the draft was gonna look like. There was a lot of uncertainty for a long time with this.

00:01:25
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, when COVID happened, it was right at the beginning of the college season. I think we only had four weeks of action for college baseball. And so for a lot of high school players, they didn't get to play at all throughout the year. Things got shut down both for us and for teams. Obviously, the draft was shortened to five rounds, which is probably the single most impactful piece of COVID. And so in some ways, the 2020 draft is maybe the easiest to analyze and react to just because the volume of players is a more manageable number. And then in other ways, It's impossible to analyze and react to because so many of the decisions that were made in this draft class just did not have the typical spring. There weren't the seasons and the information you could get updated with. We didn't have any sort of conference play for college players. You always barely get any looks at Northern High School players. And that was basically like blanketed across to every player class. In the country on the high school side. So on the prep side, you're going off of basically, okay, who looked good last summer? Which profiles are you most excited for there? And I think this was kind of right on the verge of the advanced data becoming more available on the college side of things. Maybe some teams who were ahead of the curve had that, but at least from our perspective, we were kind of a year away from getting our hands on that data in a in a big like macro way, maybe two years.

00:02:51
Speaker 3: So there's a ton of question marks.

00:02:52
Speaker 1: When we get to 21, I think we're going to talk about that. This is the last pre-data year for.

00:02:57
Speaker 3: Us at least.

00:02:58
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so I have no memory of going out for my typical spring college action early on. I think that probably got canceled when we were getting some ideas of what was happening with COVID. Cause normally I'm out week one and I don't have really any memory of seeing baseball during the spring of 2020. And then I also remember too, for us at BA, like the draft, the fact that the draft was still happening and we were still iterating and updating our list, like there was still work we could do because there are plenty of players we had to cover. We still had a BA 500, but it was such a different process that year of creating that list. And you really, like you miss obviously all of the new information. But because of just the process of the draft, there's so many players to sort through regardless. It was, It was a challenging process both for us and we'll see as we look at some of the results here for the teams as well.

00:03:53
Speaker 1: One other thing I want to point out with that that I think was very true here is it also, in addition to the lost evaluations, which were lost, teams didn't get to refine their boards. They basically got this This really, I would say, an almost misleading snapshot in some ways, right? Because a lot of times what you see pre-conference play in college baseball, it's not your best looks, right? It's not your, oh, okay, this is what I want to base everything off of. It's much more of kind of like, okay, this is setting the stage, but now let's see as the season heats up, is this player who's improved, have they sustained it? Is this player who's struggling, have they figured it out? All those things. But beyond that, I would also say that this is a class that in a lot of cases lost development time. And we're going to talk about this when we talk about 21 and 22, I think as well, especially, but they lost development time and yeah, they got it back in some ways, but I don't know if they ever really got it back. Like in some ways, like when we go through, like this is not a great draft. Like when you look at it and it's almost as big picture, it's almost kind of, reassuring that no, you can't just say we're going to stop everything months before the draft and we, everyone should be able to line it up just as well as they do with a full normal process. No, you can't. And I would say that this, this also was a draft though, that kind of allowed like, okay. One other thing we should allow it allowed teams to be more creative, but I should also say with that, We talked about it a little bit at the start. There was also a lot of uncertainty. Like, okay, MLB and the Players Association had to negotiate kind of everything, right? Because we didn't know if there was going to be a season. We didn't know how long the season was going to be. We didn't know service time, all these things that had to be negotiated. And one of the things that came out of that was really because of cost savings, really because teams wanted to save money, we got the five-round draft. Right. I would say that that also was a pretty significant change to what teams approaches were going to be because you had this rhythm, you had this understanding of how you built draft classes and all of a sudden that completely changed. This is probably, unless we get to a very different draft format than we've had, this is the only draft that we've ever been able to say every single player signed. There are five rounds here and there are no, Oh, now there are players that did not get drafted. We even have notes on who you're like, you know, Mason Miller, Mason Miller was in his fourth year at this point. Now he was at Waynesburg. So, you know, not exactly, but team saw him. And that would have been a very interesting picture to have nabbed. There were guys like that, that we're going to talk about in 21, but what, if you were to think back, like as you were talking, there was also restrictions on what teams could do. You couldn't do in you, they wanted to make sure that it wasn't something where some teams were setting up like workouts and all that. So there was kind of a scouting shutdown in essence. And then what can you do and all these different things. This was, I mean, when you look back on it, talking to scouts, talking to front offices at the time, how did they kind of adapt, adjust to essentially being told, hey, everything that you've been used to doing, none of that's going to apply this year.

00:07:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's probably the same as what we were doing. You kind of have to rely on digging into what players have already done in the past, maybe spending more time with more granularity, going over last spring, going over summer information, going over video that you have, really trying to just maximize the information that you do have. The one thing that you did have with everything that was lost is more time. evaluate players. And like you said, maybe that could lead to bad decisions because you're spending more time evaluating a much shorter window of playing time, a much smaller sample of games. I think for pitchers, it can be tricky because on the college side, your draft year is almost always like your platform year. You're put into the biggest role that you're in. Outside of these outlier players who immediately step in as starters, there are some players who are transferring colleges or maybe have been injured in the past and just haven't had a full season I think the freshman season to sophomore jump is pretty significant in college, like whether or not that is sticky or just a flash in the pan on the college side. So it was very tricky. It was a difficult class to evaluate. In terms of just like setting up our expectations for the class, it's funny to look back on now. This class was really positively viewed.

00:08:59
Speaker 3: Entering the spring.

00:09:01
Speaker 2: I remember talking to evaluators who said this was shaping up to be a really strong class.

00:09:05
Speaker 3: Particularly on the college side.

00:09:09
Speaker 2: We didn't have a clear number one player like we did in the years before with Adlai Rutschman and Casey Mize. Both those players were very clearly the top players in their class. In 2020, it was mostly like, who are you choosing, Spencer Torkelson or Austin Martin? The Arizona State first baseman and Vanderbilt outfielder. I remember really liking Austin Martin at the time. We had him one at certain stages. Then we had Spencer Torkelson at the top and we were I remember specifically you, me, and Kyle Glazer at the time, like bearing down on like what our expectations were for Spencer Torkelson's offensive profile. And when we kind of looked at it and saw what he had done and the tools he had, we're like, hey, it's kind of hard for this player to not be ranked number one. And then beyond that, it was a really exciting class of pitchers. I think part of that was coming off of this 2019 class that was really critiqued and criticized. But the expectations for this pitching crop were really high, and I also think that teams were really excited about the class given the first four weeks of what they saw. A lot of the top players really came out and played well. Asa Lacy, who maybe is one of the biggest, like the scariest players from this class because of just how quickly everything fell apart in pro ball, he dominated. And he was the consensus top arm in this class. There were guys like Emerson Hancock and Reed Detmers and Max Meyer, who you mentioned right behind him. But what stands out to me is just how, how high the expectations were for this college class. I think this group also set a record for six straight college players at the top of the board. Um, that's the first time we'd seen that in a while.

00:10:46
Speaker 3: Um, Seven, you're right. I think six was the record maybe. If there were six, that would have been the record.

00:10:51
Speaker 2: But yeah, very college heavy at the top. But you look at it now, a lot of these players in the first round haven't really panned out this kind of highly lauded high school outfielder crop. I don't know that we had lined up exactly as we would like to. We had Pete Kramstrang kind of in the top tier, but we had him behind guys like Zach Veen, Austin Hendrick, and Robert Hassel, who certainly haven't been to the same tier and then I'd say my one final point I'll make here is I think it's funny to look back on now but at the time there was a lot of talk like oh this is going to be the most college heavy draft we've ever had because of just the the missing evaluation of high school players at all I'm not sure if this was talked about before or after it was decided it was going to be five rounds but we actually saw the opposite I think because in the first five rounds that's that's typically the high school heavier portion of the draft it was actually a tremendously strong draft for just proportion of high school players selected. I pulled the numbers now, 29% of the players drafted. So just 47 of the 160 players drafted this year came from the high school ranks.

00:11:56
Speaker 3: Compared to 2019.

00:11:57
Speaker 2: Um, just 14% of signed play and this is signed players and everyone in 2020 was signed, but only 14% of the signed players in the 2019 draft came from the high school rank. So that was one maybe like demographic storyline. I was anticipating that actually the opposite happened and I almost feel a little dumb in hindsight because like we probably could have anticipated this knowing just where the high school players tend to fall. But those are some of my like overall thoughts on the class.

00:12:24
Speaker 1: Okay. So right after this break, we're going to dive into the battle at the top. Like we said, Spencer Torkelson ended up being number one on our board. He ended up going number one overall, but we'll talk about that right after this quick break. So Carlos, you said like Spencer Torkelson had the link. When we were talking about track records here, Spencer Torkelson, I would say, had the longest track record of anyone talking about the top. That was, I would say, the most challenging part of this draft, right, was that you had players who, if we look back on it, ended up, we'll get to them, who ended up being kind of probably the best picks in the first round, that you could say, well, why wasn't that guy part of the discussion at 1-1? And it's like, okay, if we rewind the clock, I don't know how you could have had that guy in the discussion for 1-1, considering... where that player was. We'll get to some of those, but at the top, like you said, even at the top, this does stick. It doesn't feel that long ago. You had Torkelson where it's like, okay, there was talk. Oh, is he going to be a third baseman? Everyone knew this was the first baseman at the end of the day. I was like, do you want to take a first baseman at the top of the draft? Okay. But you were betting on the bat there, obviously. And then you had on the hitter side, I would say it was Austin Martin was the other player in that discussion. But with Austin Martin, where Spencer Torkelson, you had this kind of like, this is what he's been. Austin Martin was much more, you were betting on the athleticism. You were betting on position improvement. Like, oh, this was going to be the year that he shows he can be a shortstop. Potentially, this is going to be the year that he shows that there's some more power in there in addition to the hitting ability. All these things where it was like, and then we just got that stop moment where it's like, okay. How confident are you that those things could happen? And then you had Nick Gonzalez, who I would say was not in the realm of that discussion, but I do want to bring him up just from the standpoint of he was in the top 10 for us and had, when we say about Spencer Torkelson, it was at a school in a league where you knew that the offenses were inflated, but he had a track record of hitting as well. I feel like those were really... you were big on Garrett Mitchell, but I don't feel like we were ever hearing Garrett Mitchell in that top, top of the board discussion. Are there any other position players who were in that, or is that kind of the group?

00:14:50
Speaker 3: No.

00:14:50
Speaker 2: And I don't even think Nick Gonzalez was really in that conversation. I feel like if it was a position player, you're talking about Torkelson and Austin Martin for the reasons you mentioned. And then I do remember Asa Lacey, maybe being more in the mix at the very top, maybe him and Emerson Hancock as legitimate candidates, but I feel like it was always kind of Torkelson or Austin Martin. That was always the conversation that I would have with scouts.

00:15:12
Speaker 3: Like, who do you prefer? Why do you prefer them?

00:15:14
Speaker 2: I mean, Spencer Torkelson, just the power that he showed in game, it was one of the most impressive power hitting college players I feel like we've ever seen. And so that maybe mitigated some of the right rate first base risk that is inherent with that profile. That is also the reason why I preferred personally, austin martin because i just felt like he had the best combination of athleticism pure hitting ability and a chance to play a premium defensive position so um i don't know i feel like you were probably more on the torkelson side but you can correct me if.

00:15:49
Speaker 3: I'm wrong yeah a little bit um yeah uh and.

00:15:52
Speaker 2: You wound up being right in terms of who's going first i think he's even been more productive in the majors so far but i was intrigued with austin martin because he was viewed as one of the better pure hitters in the class um and he was just coming off this tremendous sophomore season where he was third in the country and hits. He showed this impressive power jump. He had played some third base in the past. Then he moved to center field. So I like the fact that he could, he had a number of defensive positions he could play, but you're right. He didn't play shortstop for team USA. He played center field there. There were some throwing accuracy questions at the time, but he also drew some comps to, to Dansby Swanson, which seems funny now. Maybe a lot of that was because they were just both Vanderbilt products. They had moved around defensively. Um, And I don't know, would we have, it's always going to be an interesting what if for this 2020 class, because if Austin Martin had a full season and did go over to shortstop and played there, would he have become the consensus 1-1? Would Spencer Torkelson have just continued to mash and rake with some of these guys who didn't get a chance to test themselves in conference play? Like I'm sure a whole top 10 would have looked quite a bit different because that just happens every year. There are always players who rise, players who fall. But that's kind of our thinking at the time. How we were trying to line those guys up.

00:17:06
Speaker 1: I would say with Austin Martin, the range of what could have happened with him, I feel like could be like he could have gone 1-1 or he could have fallen out of the top 10 from a standpoint of like there was so much projection defensively on what you thought he was going to be, right? There was real belief. There was real thought that this guy might be a shortstop.

00:17:26
Speaker 2: Right.

00:17:27
Speaker 1: If that season had kind of disproved that, right? If that season had basically been like, not only is he not a shortstop, he doesn't look that great a second, you know, or something like that. Well, then it would have, I think very much changed the profile. Cause it had been like, okay, maybe he's a center fielder, but even if he's a center fielder, I don't know. He's not an eight runner. He's not right. The power is not like it would have all of a sudden, I think changed in one direction. Or if he had gone out, which I would say like looking back in hindsight, like, I don't think he would have gone out and shown that he's a surefire shortstop because he never showed that in pro ball, right? It does not seem like that that was something that was in. He ended up not being a center fielder at the end of the day. He ended up being more kind of like this multi-position corner outfielder slash second baseman. So it may have moved him kind of down the being kind of where you take projection away and replace projection with what you're seeing with your own eyes. The flip side of that is okay. Let's just dive into Asa Lacey, right? Asa Lacey, I would say, was very much viewed as in that mix for 1-1. And if you said why, well, of all the pitchers we're going to talk about here, Asa Lacey probably had the track record that you could be most comfortable about. He had been a, not just productive, but a very good starter the year before. And then he had gone out and utterly shoved at the start of the season, and again, in the briefest of brief times, and you're like, oh, he looks even better now. Now, there was a little bit of control command questions, but stuff-wise, there was nothing to really dislike. This looked like what you were looking for in a top-of-the-draft college lefty. In every way, but we'll never know. And he never, to be honest, he never showed that in pro ball the same way. right? Like he had injury issues. He had the control problems that have flashed the command forms that flash turned into real, like almost like he had Steve last disease issues. Like, but there was injuries tied to it too. You don't know how to separate it all out. We never saw it again, but I just, I want to kick it back to you, but I want to say if you look at it now and you're like, how did Asa Lacy go top five? At the time, I think it was much more, how did Asa Lacy fall to pick four?

00:19:54
Speaker 2: That's exactly what it was. I was just looking at our day one analysis to see. And we mentioned for both the Royals and the Blue Jays, the fact that the Royals in particular were able to pick between both Austin Martin and Asa Lacy was really surprising to us at the time. Um, Max Meyer, we didn't view as like quite the same level. And then Hess and Kersad going number two was maybe the biggest surprise up at the top. We had Kersad ranked in the middle of the first round, but I don't think we had heard much at all about him going this high. And maybe that highlights just Baltimore's desire at every opportunity to take these left-handed hitting power types, these left-handed hitting outfielders they've done a lot of, but yeah, Asa Lacey, it's easy to forget now because of his pro career, but he was dominant in early on in this 2020 season. And I think some of the adjustments he showed from a pitch quality perspective also helped him elevate and move up the board. It wasn't just the case that he came out with the same sort of pure stuff and was really good against bad competition. Although I do think there are maybe some question marks that we even saw hints of that maybe would have been more exposed if we had a full season. But I remember he added a lot of power to his slider. He entered the year with some questions about, okay, how good Is your breaking ball really? The changeup and the fastball were dominant pitches entering the year, but the slider looked much better. He was earning some slider comparisons to Carlos Rodon. And so if you were looking at Asa Lacey as like the next version of a Carlos Rodon sort of power left-handed pitcher in college, and you're looking at the strikeouts he racked up in four starts, he struck out 46 batters, walked eight and allowed just two runs, two earned runs, excuse me. Um, but then if you, if you keep looking down our report, I think this is maybe the area of Asa Lacy's profile that we didn't get to see exposed that maybe it would have, but scouts at the time were looking for nitpicks. This is what we do with players at the top of any given class. And Asa Lacy did have a lot of deep counts. Um, he was not super efficient with his pitches. It took a lot of pitches for him to finish off batters. I think part of that is because, um, he couldn't attack the zone as consistently as maybe a typical elite, like strikeout and walk pitcher at the top of a draft could, uh, a lot of his swing and miss was chase out of the zone. So for me, this is another specific area that I'm looking at for elite pitchers is like, okay, you're getting a lot of strikeouts. Are those swinging swings and misses coming on in zone misses? Are they coming on chases? Because while getting players to chase is a good thing, I do think in college, uh, You're facing worse hitters who have less zone discipline. If you're reliant on out-of-zone chases to get your strikeouts, there are going to be a lot of hitters in pro ball who are just going to keep the barrel on their shoulder. They're not going to swing. They're going to take their walk and move on. So you're going to be able to need to challenge players in the zone. And I do think Ace Alassie always had the stuff to miss hitters in the zone. His command was just far worse than we expected it to be. And I think him not having to pitch a full season maybe helped him kind of go in the range where he, he still went.

00:23:02
Speaker 1: I will also say though, like he is someone where you like, okay. If you look at it, we're looking at it with hindsight now because he's basically done right. Like he last pitched pro ball been released now, but he last pitched in pro ball in 2022 injuries played a role in this, obviously, but at the same time, he threw 80 innings in the minors after throwing 150 innings in college. And by the way, we throw on the fact that he had a shortened COVID year. His walk rate in the minors was from day one astronomically higher than it ever was. I would love to say we should have picked up more of the indicators because you're right. The report kind of does talk about it. But I would also say something went worse. You don't see a guy go from being a weekend starter in the SEC and being effective week after week after week to to walking almost a batter an inning in the Midwest league the next year and go, yeah, nothing, you know, that, yeah, we should have seen that. Like there was something weird here, but this is where this is like, this year was so challenging is he was, he had the track record. He had done it for a while and he looked like a top of the draft pitcher. And then we had, I would say kind of, We'll get to Kirstein because that's a different story. But Max Meyer was the ascending pitcher that year who, if you loved him, you could talk yourself into it. But it was kind of two pitches. The body was smaller. There was a lot of concerns there where you really could also talk yourself out of it very easily by saying, I needed to see it for 15 starts to be comfortable saying this is what this guy is, right?

00:24:53
Speaker 3: Right.

00:24:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, I remember Max Meyer had one of the freakier sliders we saw at the time, but he did have that heavy two-pitch arsenal. He was a little bit smaller. He had a two-way track record. So you could take it whatever direction you wanted. If you wanted to dream on Max Meyer and say, okay, with continued focus on pitching full-time, he's already this good. He's already showing this pure stuff. What could he be with the full-time focus on pitching? You could go the other way. You could say, okay, he doesn't really have a third arsenal. He doesn't have this super lengthy track record.

00:25:22
Speaker 3: Of starting. He's smaller.

00:25:24
Speaker 2: There are not a lot of guys who are six foot, 185 pounds, who can just hold up and do it for a long time. So I remember those kind of starter reliever question marks, question marks, excuse me, about Max Meyer. But I think he went from entering the year. We had him near the back of the first round, kind of in that range. And then over his first four starts, he did enough to like vault up into top 10 consideration. Even though I was still a little bit surprised where he went on like third overall to the Marlins, I think heading into the draft. Um, and that draft was also super weird. Cause it was in Secaucus, uh, MLB network studios. And I remember like, not everyone was coming in to cover the draft. Like the MLB network reached out to me. They're like, Hey, do you want to come in or do it from, from home? So covering that draft, I was just in like a studio by myself. Um, with like no one around, it was a ghost town. Everyone's wearing masks. It was such a weird environment, but I do remember we had some, Oh, Max Meyer could go pretty high whispers, uh, heading into that day. But yeah, third overall is definitely not something I would have expected at the time, especially with both Lacey and Martin still on the board.

00:26:26
Speaker 1: Okay. So now let's get into the, we'll, we'll get to Kierstad next, but I want to bring up like in hindsight, the white socks are the one that got it right. Picking 11, they take Garrett crochet who of this top group of pitchers. We're not Pete Crow Armstrong. Again, I don't think that you could say like, well, he should have gotten one, one in hindsight. Absolutely. He's going to win an MVP award this year, but again, for the guys who could have at least been, you could have constructed a case, Garrett Crochet, you could have constructed a case at the time. You would have been the, you would have been the most aggressive risk willing to take on risk team out there to do so though, because Garrett Crochet had been a reliever the year before at Tennessee had come out and it had been one start. It was a really good start, but How much are you willing to go in on literally one start and then COVID hit? But what do you remember? Again, is that like credit to the White Sox for recognizing it even at 11? Or was that like a spot? Because again, we talk about Max Meyer rising up. Garrett Crochet was someone who you saw everything you wanted to see potentially from as far as projecting him as a starter. He just didn't have the ability to have seen it.

00:27:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't really think that in terms of like talent, like once you get to 15, we had him rank 15 on the board. We had Pete Cromshaw rank 17th. So you could make cases for both those guys inside the back of the 10 on draft day if you wanted to. I don't know that there was this huge gap between Garrett Crochet and Max Meyer or even a Reed Detmers. I mean, we had him ranked a little bit. further down because there were more relief questions, but we just finished talking about the relief questions we had with Max Meyer at the time. Um, the injury questions added to that, but I mean, he had an explosive fastball at the time. He created a really uncomfortable at bats. Uh, the secondary offerings, I think both of them had been inconsistent previously. And then he flat again, kind of like Asa Lacey, kind of like Max Meyer, uh, looked electric early on. This is another one of the reasons that people were super excited about what this class could have been. Cause all these guys came out and were just dominant. Um, I remember thinking of Garrett crochet as like one of this huge variance, high upside, high risk prospect. Like no one, no one doubted the stuff at the time. Um, obviously no one's going to expect he would have the career that he is wound up having, but that like this outcome was certainly in the realm of possibilities at the time. Um, And so I think him going there wasn't a surprise, I would say, but it is also a credit to the White Sox for doing it and for helping him improve, and a credit to Crochet for just making the strides that he's made as a starter moving forward. And I also wonder, now that we're seeing Hagen Smith doing what he's doing in pro ball, I think Hagen Smith, this may be an unrelated topic, but Hagen Smith shares some of the traits that Garrett Crochet had at the time, and I wonder if he'll follow a similar path, kind of reliever up to the majors and converting to a starter, this really electric two pitch mixed left-hander. Different bodies, different stuff, different ways of attacking, but I'm more intrigued by pitchers like Garrett Crochet because we've seen him have success. We've seen guys like Jacob Mizurowski come up and have success. Yeah, so he's a really fun one.

00:29:55
Speaker 1: I think that we're seeing this in the draft now, right? The gap between this guy is a surefire reliever and this guy is a surefire starter has kind of compressed. We just, I mentioned the guy who we're going to be talking about next year again in 21 draft, but like Mason Miller, who has had some injury issues, but if you came up as a starter and like, again, in a different environment, I wouldn't say that it's impossible to think that maybe a team would have said, like having seen what we've seen with some of these other pitchers, Hey, maybe I'll give a run at that. Okay, I do want to bring up Kirsteck because he went two overall. That was, I would say, we talked about that Lacey and Martin being there at four and five was surprising. Heston Kirsteck going two at the time, I remember being quite surprising as well. We will note he signed a bonus that would slot him basically in that eight, nine range as far as what he made.

00:30:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, he signed for.

00:30:58
Speaker 2: He signed for $ 5. 2 million. There were six players who signed for more money than he did. Spencer Torkelson, Austin Martin, Max Meyer, Asa Lacey, Emerson Hancock, and Nick Gonzalez. So yeah, the Orioles were clearly doing a money saver strategy. And I feel like talking about Heston Kerr said you also have to fold in just what else they did in this class. They got Jordan Westberg at pick 30, Hudson Haskin in the second round, Kobe Mayo. and Carter Baumler were the two big, pricey high school players they signed in the fourth and fifth round. And then they rounded out their class with Anthony Servideo in the third round. But yeah, definitely a portfolio sort of package for the Orioles. And I think maybe in hindsight, we should have been less surprised by just any surprise pick here, just given the nature of the class as we're talking about it. And Heston Kersad also had a pretty rock solid track record as a hitter i think i think for me it was like i maybe thought lesser of him compared to the elite players at the top because of the no doubt corner profile but if you look at what he did both in college with arkansas in the sec with team usa in the summer left-handed power on base skills solid batting average like i i think that it In hindsight, yeah, it maybe should have been less surprising because he did a lot of stuff to warrant there and also knowing just Baltimore's tendencies maybe should have been a little bit more open-minded.

00:32:34
Speaker 3: But I think having done so many.

00:32:36
Speaker 2: Drafts where there are surprises, this is also why I always tell people, hey, keep an open mind. We don't know what's going to happen. Yeah, but I don't think this pick is as crazy today as it seemed at the time.

00:32:46
Speaker 3: How about you?

00:32:47
Speaker 1: I would say that knowing now what we've seen the Orioles do year after year after this, this becomes like, oh yeah, that makes sense. At the time, we didn't know that, right? Like this was something where at the time, Colton Couser's in the future still. Like the Orioles drafting a college outfielder high in pretty much every draft since then has not. And when you say also, let's add another part to this. With them knowing what we know now, which we didn't fully know at that time, Okay, the Orioles were not taking a pitcher at pick two. In fact, there are notes in our notes from that time saying, like, I don't think they'll take a pitcher at two. Well, with knowing that, Torkelson's off the board. If you're not a fan of Austin Martin, if you're not a fan of Nick Gonzalez and you want to take a bat.

00:33:40
Speaker 2: And all three of those guys you just mentioned are right-right. So there are reasons that you could say, oh, Baltimore doesn't maybe want those profiles.

00:33:47
Speaker 1: So if that's the case, then all of a sudden this becomes much more kind of like, okay, to an essence, Monday morning quarterback from years later, we think that we like this guy at least as much, if not better than that. And by the way, we can get this guy at two and pay him basically at six where we're Right. Well, let's, let's go with it. And by the way, it worked out. Jordan Westberg ended up being a very productive player. Not that they paid him massively more. Kobe Mayo is a big leaguer. We're still seeing how much he's going to, he's a kind of a platoon player, but he's been a very useful platoon player this year.

00:34:26
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:34:26
Speaker 1: This is not the year that that really kind of derailed for them. Okay. I do want to kind of move further down in the draft now in that first round. And we said there was a lot of high school outfitters in this class. We had, Robert Hassel, we had Zach Veen, we had Austin Hendrick, but then most importantly, we had, you know, we had Jordan Walker as a third baseman and then we had Pete Crow Armstrong. Okay. PCA, I would say the defensive reputation at that time is every bit. There is nothing about what he has done defensively in center field that if you asked us in 2020, none of that would be surprising. He was already showing he was as good as there was defensively, had made game-changing how-did-he-make-that plays.

00:35:17
Speaker 2: Pekra Armstrong is still, to this day, him and Drew Jones are the two best amateur centerfield defenders that I've ever seen, and watching him rob home runs with Team USA still sticks.

00:35:26
Speaker 3: In my mind.

00:35:27
Speaker 2: This is also two years removed from Bryce Terang, and I think there are some similarities between Bryce Terang and Pekra Armstrong. They are both pure polished left-handed hitting premium position, California preps who entered the summer of their draft years as arguably the top players in the class. They both struggled in the summer and fell a little bit down the board because of that going from top five, top 10 sort of talents in the class to middle of the first round talents. They both went in the middle of the first round. And now in hindsight, both those players you would want a lot higher. And then Pete Cromstrong, even more than Bryce Turing, obviously has had this just like power surge that I don't think we ever could have anticipated at the time he's, he's coming off of one of the best seasons ever for, for any player we've seen at the major league level this year, which is insane. Maybe the best defensive player in baseball. In addition to being, what do you get? He got 40, 40 this year, peak Armstrong, 40 home runs thinking about that in high school, never, ever would have thought that is in the realm of possibilities for him. So the power is definitely more than we expected, but I think even outside of, the power you could have looked at the other high school outfielders in the class and said, yeah, I would still prefer him to a Robert Hassel or a Zach Veen or an Austin Hendrick. Even in hindsight now, like the, the tier of those players wasn't significant. Maybe as significant as number 17, where we ranked the PCA to number seven for Zach Veen, maybe in the case, like there's always this big cluster of players. But yeah, this one probably hurts if you're a Mets fan because Pekar Armstrong, has been the best player in this draft class. None of that value has come for the Mets, obviously, and that trade is going to be one that's discussed for a long, long time. But yeah, Pete Cromshong right above Garrett Crochet, not right above, quite a bit above Garrett Crochet in terms of baseball reference war from this class.

00:37:20
Speaker 1: The other thing that I'll say that for the first round, kind of wrapping up the first round, that two other parts of the standout. One is this is the year where you had high school players who were taken who were the lack of a full senior season is apparent in how they went out and performed, right? Ed Howard went 16 to the Cubs and from day one of his pro career, there were real, well, not day one, by day 60, by day 90 of the 2021 season, you could be asking real questions. Is this guy ever going to hit in pro ball? He never did.

00:37:53
Speaker 3: Right.

00:37:55
Speaker 1: Carson Tucker, Carson Tucker, for a reasonably, you know, not re but I know, I think there were some injuries there, but Carson Tucker had one of the shortest minor league careers of any first round position player that we're going to have seen in the last like 10, 15 years. It was, he, I mean, when we say like Ed Howard didn't hit, but Carson Tucker, it was absolutely worse than that. You know, as far as like, he was a one 65 to 75, five 15 hitter in a ball. So that was another point. Nick Bitsko, who was kind of like had thrown in a, you know, in a facility.

00:38:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, Nick Bitsko was a reclass as well.

00:38:36
Speaker 2: So he was not getting like super bared down on the summer prior. And then Northern Arm, COVID, didn't see him in the spring. So he was the like high risk of high risk.

00:38:45
Speaker 1: He was like, okay, I'll put it all in, you know, like I'm going to put it all in on, you know, on this one number. If we hit, it'll be great. It didn't hit. He had injury issues. I would say even like a Justin Lang was another pop-up, I would say. You had this number of guys where it's like, if you took big swings in this class, those swings, because of the lack of time, in many cases, didn't really work out. But again, but also you had some high school players in this class who really did work out. Looking a little further down, the one– I'm sorry. The one area we should talk about is this because I think it has been useful for us going forward. I would say that Austin Wells, who went 28 to the Yankees, and I don't want to make it sound like Austin Wells has been like, you know, the best player from this class or anything like that. Like if you were even drafting catchers at the back of the first round, I think you could argue Tyler Soderstrom who obviously no longer catches instead, but Austin Wells, I think was important going forward for the draft because, and I think teams have even looked at this. The improvement Austin Wells made defensively at catcher from when he was drafted to when he reached the big leagues was useful for other teams to see because I don't think you could find a whole lot of people at the time in 2020. You found guys who liked the bat. Carlos, do you really remember a whole lot of thought this guy's going to be a big league catcher?

00:40:10
Speaker 3: Absolutely not.

00:40:11
Speaker 2: I also remember in my final mock draft saying the Yankees specifically, I don't know that Austin Wells is a player that they'll be interested in taking. So I missed on that one after they had selected him out of high school as well. But Austin Wells is one of these like formative catching examples for me in the discussion about like how teams can develop really advanced receivers at catching. I feel like it's always the receiving piece too that winds up being just better than people expect or I know a lot of amateur scouts have told me like, hey, we just don't know that we have a good way to scout receiving at the amateur level, both because of the views you're mostly using and because just like a lot of these guys are not getting the sort of instruction in college, in high school that they're going to very immediately get in very immediately. I don't know if that's great grammar, but they're going to very quickly get in in pro ball and guys like Austin Wells, guys like Ryan Jeffers, guys like Bo Naylor. are some of the catchers I go back to when you're looking at amateur catchers who maybe you view skeptically as a receiver and just think of like, okay, what are the things they can't do? And are teams able to help them improve in those areas? And I feel like for me, it's just made me a lot more open-minded about the players who you're going to give a chance to catch at the next level. And Austin Wells becoming one of the better receivers was certainly not something we expected. We viewed him very much as a, hit first contact power guy who, if he can just stick at catcher and be below average there, just get by, you'd be happy. And he obviously has been quite a bit better than that behind the plate.

00:41:47
Speaker 1: I would also, and I'm trying to look it up and I'm not going to get it looked up in time. I would also say that Austin Wells was a useful part of what was also going on big picture with this. I'm going to bring up one knee catching, which is, Oh, no.

00:42:01
Speaker 3: Don't get JJ started on one-knee catching.

00:42:04
Speaker 1: I'm just going to say, though, I'll make it quick, but I'll just point out, you had guys who, when it came to blocking and receiving, didn't look that great. But this was right at the fulcrum point. At the pro level, we were seeing teams adopt one-knee catching. And as much as some traditionalists may hate to hear this, there's a number of catchers who, the way their bodies work, fit better for that than it did for the traditional setup. I, again, I don't have, I was trying to get the synergy to do it, but I'll just leave it. But I don't think Austin Wells ever won knee caught in college. And so I do think that that very well may have helped kind of unlock more defensively for him. I do want to kind of move it on to later rounds. So second round, the thing I will say about this draft overall is again, it encourages me that, when you make it this crazy, you don't get the same order that you normally do. Normally while there are misses in the top, in the first round, it's not, it does not feel like random order. This is a draft where it feels like if you said, we're going to take the first round and just kind of toss it in the air, right? The order of how the best players turned out kind of fits more of that second going on in this draft. I feel like that's also the case. Um, In the second round, the guy that I feel like we have to talk about is pick 50, second round, Rangers select Evan Carter, which was seismic at the time.

00:43:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm glad we got here because I don't think we can talk about this 2020 draft without talking about the Rangers draft and just how shocking their draft was for the industry at the time. Evan Carter was a player who we had almost nothing on Heading into this draft, I think we had a single note about Evan Carter, and it was basically like, oh, yeah, there's this interesting kind of athletic, really deep projection kid in Tennessee. We didn't have him ranked on the BA 500. And even after that, so let's just talk through the whole Rangers class here.

00:44:15
Speaker 3: I'll pull it up. Sorry, I've been.

00:44:16
Speaker 1: Pulling up some other teams.

00:44:17
Speaker 3: I got it here.

00:44:18
Speaker 1: Justin Foscue in the first and 14, Evan Carter to Cole Rope.

00:44:22
Speaker 2: Justin Foskey was maybe the one stock player that teams thought made sense at the time. He was not this off-the-board pick. You could easily talk yourself into why he would go there, even if I think he was a little bit higher than where we.

00:44:35
Speaker 3: Had on the board.

00:44:36
Speaker 1: Takoa Roby, the pitcher in the third round, 86. Dylan McLean, another high school pitcher in the fourth round, 115, who got more money. And then Thomas Segacy, high school shortstop in the fifth round, 145.

00:44:51
Speaker 2: Okay, so to give you an overview of where we were thinking about this Rangers class at the time, they took Justin Foskey at pick 14. We had him ranked 36. They took Evan Carter at pick 50. We didn't have him ranked on our top 500 board. They took TK Roby at 86. We had him ranked 155. They took Dylan McLean, 115. We had him ranked 258. They took Thomas Sejasi, 145. We had him ranked 280. So like the BA 500 board at the time, hated this draft. And I remember like asking a bunch of people, I was like, Hey, did we like miss on this Rangers class? Like clearly we missed on Evan Carter, but a lot of other people also thought this was a really off the board wild draft.

00:45:35
Speaker 3: For the Rangers at the time.

00:45:36
Speaker 2: And this was maybe my first like shocking example of how much the Rangers, if they like players, they're just going to take them. They do not care what the industry consensus is. They don't care about their parties. We saw that this with their draft, in 2026 where they're just happy to take risks with the number of high school players they selected in 2026 outside of Justin Foscue. This was a straight high school class and kudos to the Rangers because Evan Carter not only was like a really great pick, but I mean, I just appreciate this strategy. And it's also another good reminder for me, like, Hey, when, when there are players who are taken, who are surprises to you, the automatic gut instinct should not be, Hey, this is a bad pick. The automatic instinct for me now is like, okay, what does this team know about this player that I don't? What am I missing here? Why do they like him? What do they think they can do from a PD perspective? Why was this player not as talked about from the industry? We'll see what Evan Carter does with the rest of his career, but if he does nothing else, outside of his tremendous rookie season, this has to be viewed as a successful pick. In terms of where he stacks up and in terms of total war, he is at Ninth overall in between Alec Burleson and Tyler Soderstrom. Pretty fun draft here.

00:46:54
Speaker 1: I would say that the last point you made there, the second to last point, is the most important one here. I'm proud to say that we never wrote anything, I don't believe, that was like, ha ha, look at these crazy Rangers and what they did.

00:47:07
Speaker 2: I was trying to find it because I think what we wrote was like, Off the board Rangers drought, like talking about it being off the board and being surprised, but we weren't like, this is a terrible, I hope so.

00:47:17
Speaker 3: I hope we weren't. I don't think we did.

00:47:19
Speaker 1: But especially, okay, this is a point like overall on this, right? Like this is something that we really do try to do. Like I'm just speaking for us.

00:47:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:47:28
Speaker 1: I know that there is a goal of being hot takey and, you know, that you have to have an instant analysis of every draft and whether it's great or terrible and all that. The thing that stood out at the time on this was, if you just put it all together, was, wait, you're saying in a draft where no one has seen any of these players play for months before the draft, if you thought that a player that you didn't know a whole lot about being picked is a terrible idea, that's expecting in yourself a level of understanding that That's probably impossible for anybody, right? Which is, yeah, to what you said, it was more useful to be what do they know that not just us, but much of the industry didn't know. Because let's be clear on this. There were other teams who knew about Evan Carter. There were very few other teams who would have even considered drafting him. And there were very few other teams who saw the improvement he had made from the summer before and to that spring to even think of him as being potentially a draftable prospect not a go-to-school guy that's credit to the rangers and again when you look at this draft yeah it's not like the best draft in this draft but they've already gotten three big leaguers out of it they traded sagacy to the cardinals roby's probably gonna make the big leagues as well they're gonna go probably at the end of the day four for five on big leaguers and i wouldn't be shocked at all if we saw that Again, Carter's going to be the standout, but they end up getting four guys who have useful careers of some sort.

00:49:08
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:49:10
Speaker 2: Right now they rank 11th in terms of B-War from this class. And obviously there's still a lot of room to, for those numbers to change and develop a few other like standouts later in the draft. I want to talk about if there's no players that you want to mention, but I mean, one of the best players from this class so far, again, just in terms of a baseball reference war is Mason Wynn, who the Cardinals took in the second round. Mason Wynn, I think is a fun story because he may be his, maybe even still has the most dominant Jupiter outing for a high school player that we've ever seen. I don't know how many Cardinals fans probably haven't forgotten about this, but Mason Witten was a legitimate pitching prospect at the time. He was one of the better two-way players in class. He had this like elite ability to generate velocity. He also had a, like this snappy hammer of a breaking ball. And I remember just hearing scouts rave about how dominant he looked.

00:50:02
Speaker 3: He pitched. And I think he had like.

00:50:04
Speaker 2: Three batter balls at Jupiter and, hit harder than 100 miles per hour and.

00:50:09
Speaker 3: Was just electric.

00:50:11
Speaker 2: And the development that he's shown in the hitter that he's become has been impressive to see. And then I think the other player we have to talk about in this draft is Spencer Strider, fourth-round pick from the Braves. We talk about Evan Carter as a guy we didn't have on the board and missed on. Spencer Strider is also a player. that we didn't have on the BA 500. And this one pains me maybe even more because I think there are some like real logistical reasons why Evan Carter might've not been on the board, but Spencer Strider was a prominent high school pitcher. And then he gets to college, he gets injured. And the Braves were really excited about him because they saw his really impressive performance in his first four weeks. I don't have the numbers up right now, but I know he was, he was pretty dominant and they loved his, just makeup and mentality, how he thought about pitching. And they thought there was a lot they could do to get him even better moving forward. I don't know that he had the same slider that really helped him pitch like an ace at the major league level at that time. But I think the Braves should get a lot of credit for the Spencer Strider pick at various points over the last few years. You could maybe say Spencer Strider was the best player from this class. It looks like he's going to be passed over by by a few hitters, but getting him in the fourth round at pick 126, I think is an excellent pick. Those are the two that I think are definitely worth highlighting. And I'd be a little upset if I didn't mention Mason Wynn, Spencer Strider.

00:51:41
Speaker 1: I'd also want to just mention the Cardinals draft, right? The Cardinals, I feel like had the, like, if you said who did this the best that year, the Cardinals got Jordan Walker, who obviously this year finally, you know, but he's still young enough that you're like, okay, there's a lot of runway for Jordan Walker to be a very productive big league player. You mentioned Mason Wynn. You've got to throw Alec Burleson in there, who was their third second-round pick. They did have five top 100 picks.

00:52:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I pulled up just all the teams in baseball reference where the Cardinals are second behind only the Mets. Again, sorry Mets fans for this one. It's mostly PCA. But in the second round, they also have JT Ginn getting nearly five more. But yeah, Cardinals are second in terms of total war. That's because all their picks– and hitting on a couple of guys in the second round, Mason went and Alec Brilson in particular. And like you said, we'll see what, we'll see what Alec Brilson does. I think the tigers are also worth mentioning too. They just have a lot of hits in this class. I mean, we'll see. Um, I don't think Torkelson is going to live up to his, his pre-draft hype at this rate, but he could still be a productive player. They also got Dylan Dingler, who you just mentioned in the second round, he's been worth seven war Colt Keith.

00:52:48
Speaker 3: They got in the fifth round. That's a great pick.

00:52:51
Speaker 2: Um, And they've also got a couple other big leaguers with Trey Cruz and Gage Workman. But those first three, Dingler, Torkelson, and Keith, could be really productive players for a while. And they're also near the top of the class in terms of just war produced so far.

00:53:05
Speaker 1: That's what I would say with this is that, again, Spencer Strider actually fits almost in the discussion, the Alex Manoa discussion, very different way. But, like, we don't know if Spencer Strider– Spencer Strider's now– there was the Braves' willingness to take on injury risk. has both paid off for them and does lead to moments like this, right? We saw that Spencer Strider and Spencer Schwalemach are two guys who, when they drafted them, there was injury, background and injury risk. They've been great, and they've also been injured. Now, both of those probably go together, but if Spencer Strider never is able to get back to his pre-injury form going forward, it's still an incredible pick. It's still one of the best picks from this draft. And it's one that kind of, again, it won them not just games. I mean, it won them. It got them to postseasons. He was a dominant pitcher. Hopefully he gets back there. But I do think that this was a year where, you know, this was a year that really did allow teams to be a little different, to be a little creative. And in some cases it worked out. In some cases it didn't. But I would say with this one also, this is one where I would feel like that the draft's always hard. This draft was so hard that if you're saying, how did my team blow it in this draft? Give them a little bit more understanding on this one because this is not a normal draft. This was not. And again, I say also, we do not know. We do not have the sliding doors to say, This is how these players would have turned out if they hadn't lost effectively a full year at a very important time. That affects you developmentally. It's much different if you're 20, 1920 than it is if you're 23. Hey, there might be a pitcher who actually has had a good career because he didn't get hurt that year and he would have gotten hurt. You know, if it could go both ways, but I just do feel like that this draft, like, okay, to wrap it up, I'll let you wrap it up here, Carlos. Looking back on it, what did we learn from this draft, do you think? Did this start a new... I do feel like we've divided everything baseball-wise into pre-COVID and then post-COVID. Did anything change as far as how teams drafted after this?

00:55:42
Speaker 2: I mean, we do see a difference in terms of just the college players who were taken early on, the high school pitchers who, let me see this year. I mean, maybe this is a first year where really the high school pitchers stopped going as high as they did with the volume they did. I think that there's a clear line to me of just those players going later in the draft. Potentially COVID could have some impacts on that. I don't know that I have like a very clear and obvious takeaway that like, like what is the lesson learned of COVID? Like my lesson learned is like, Hey, all the springtime we get is super valuable and our opinions on these players change regularly. So we need to really follow them as much as we possibly can. And not having that is just going to lead to a lot of really bad looking picks in hindsight. Like it's going to make it a process that is already so uncertain and volatile even more so. And so I just think it like, it makes me value the spring looks even more. I mean, do you feel like there's a clear takeaway? I do think there's some like micro, like there's some players you could point to like an Austin Wells and one knee catching how that impacts our viewing scouting, like pre data on the college side from our perspective, like there are things like that. Like, but I also sometimes hesitate about like layering on a narrative too heavily. So those are maybe some of the things I think about.

00:57:02
Speaker 3: How about you?

00:57:04
Speaker 1: If I was going to come away from this, and again, I don't want to go too overboard with this, but if you look back at this draft and you said, is there a theme that you should follow that will serve you well? In a draft where the evaluation period was vastly truncated, there's some safety in tools that are much less volatile, right? The up-the-middle defenders from this class, I would say, have ended up being in general. If your MO going in was give me shortstops who are really good defensively, give me centerfielders, give me catchers, Dylan Dingler. Let's not talk about Austin Wells and that, but Dylan Dingler. Patrick Bailey, Dylan Dingler. Those were guys who had excellent defensive reputation at the time. Garrett Mitchell had.

00:57:58
Speaker 3: An excellent– I was about to bring him up.

00:58:00
Speaker 2: I wasn't going to get out of this podcast without talking about Garrett Mitchell, but I agree. I think what you're saying here makes sense. And also I feel like we've talked about up the middle players panning out in every one of these draft redos that we've done. And I think teams already really covet the position. And I almost wonder like, do they covet the position enough even still? And I feel like one of the lessons we've learned from doing all these is like, Hey, you, you really cannot go wrong. by just doubling and tripling down on up the middle players. Cause they always seem to be at the top of the board here on these redrafts. And it's just very nice to see Garrett Mitchell kind of figuring it out at the major league level now, because he was such a polarizing player at the time. He was Uber toolsy. He had the super unusual batted ball profile. He had the diabetes background and kind of like, Oh, how's that going to impact him? He was, he was a very cool human interest story. He was a cool, Story as like a prospect on his own tools and his own merits. And I just the Brewers have taken a number of these like high risk sort of profiles the teams let fall down the board to them and it's panned out a few times in this sort of region of draft history we're looking at. Bryce Terang in 2018, if that was his draft year. And then Garrett Mitchell two years later. Both guys there getting in the middle of the draft that, in hindsight, would go higher. So it's just cool to see him coming off his career-best season in 2026.

00:59:28
Speaker 1: Even a guy like Alika Williams, who there was a lot of big questions about his bat, and I'm not saying Alika Williams has become some draft standout from this class, but he's been better than a lot of guys taken around him. And you say, why? It's like there was never a question about his ability to play defense. There was a question about everything else. There was never a question about his ability to play shortstop. And so that's one of the things that I think that does stand out from this, and that's kind of something we'll continue looking at as we go forward. and continue. I don't know when we'll cut this off. Cause again, I don't think we can evaluate the 2026 draft to go.

00:59:59
Speaker 2: We're getting a little close to the range where like, Hey, we're still, we're still don't know yet, but I.

01:00:04
Speaker 1: Would say though, 21 and 22, I think that those are ones that you can look back on with some, some level. I think that's probably about where we probably have to cut it off for now. But like, I do think with those, you still have some level of, of hindsight. We definitely do a 2020, not that the, all these players are done by any stretch, but you kind of have, you know that some of them have really turned out and some of them have not, and obviously some of that will change. But that is our look at the 2020 MLB draft, our look back. We will move on. We will do 2021 next week, so you can look forward to that and probably a little bit of bleed-over talk of guys who could have been drafted in 20 and then ended up in the 21 class and the difficulty of all that. We'll cover that. But if you haven't checked out the other ones, we've done this for 17, 18, and 19 as well. So this is the fourth of the series. And we've done all that. You should check out the Baseball America feed, the draft podcast. We've done that four weeks in a row now. For Carlos, I'm JJ. So long, everybody.