Recently, I saw someone tweet something about the anniversary of Gerrit Cole being drafted in 2011, and I went back into my archives to find the post that I wrote that day. I found a couple of posts I wrote from the day of the draft and the day after, both in which I said something like this: Gerrit Cole seems like a talented player and a very good prospect, but my preference is that the Pirates draft Anthony Rendon.
It’s four years later now, and Cole looks like a potential All-Star Game starter and is an early-season Cy Young candidate. If the Pirates had to draw an Ideal 2015 Gerrit Cole on Draft Night 2011 when they picked him, that sketch would look an awful lot like the Actual 2015 Gerrit Cole. Here’s the other thing, though: it’s still impossible to tell whether he’ll be a better player than Anthony Rendon.
The lesson here isn’t that I was “right” for saying that the Pirates should’ve drafted Rendon. It’s that I wasn’t doing much of anything beyond guessing and even if that old draft day preference turns out to be “right,” it doesn’t mean the Pirates made the wrong decision when they picked Cole. When the Pirates picked Cole, they had a vision of what he could become, regardless of what he’d been to that point. It wasn’t necessarily a unique vision (back in those posts mentioned above, I link to Keith Law saying that he thought Cole was clearly the best prospect in the draft and put him on a Strasburg tier, which was the highest compliment you could give to a prospect in 2011). It didn’t matter to them that they “needed” a hitter more or that Trevor Bauer had much better numbers at UCLA, they had a process, that process brought them Cole, they followed through on it, and the results to this point have been excellent. My opinion on Cole was mostly based on things I’d read on the internet to that point, and maybe a very small amount of college baseball viewing (most likely, I didn’t watch Cole until that year’s College World Series, which was after the draft).
I have a little more trouble writing about the draft every year, because the longer I do this the more I realize that my draft day opinions are just opinions that I feel like I have to have for the sake of having opinions. Last year’s draft was particularly eye-opening for me. The Pirates drafted Cole Tucker with the 24th pick and most people’s immediate reaction was to freak out. Tucker had barely cracked most draft day top 100s, and it was treated like a huge reach by the Pirates at 24. And then shortly afterwards, Peter Gammons said that the A’s were ready to pick Tucker with the 25th pick, and a lot of teams had Tucker ranked closely to where the Pirates picked him. Literally almost every analyst had ignored the one thing that all of the teams valued most highly in Tucker — his age. What Tucker had done in high school took on an entirely different light once you realized that he was close to a year younger than some of the other high school seniors drafted the same day as him. He didn’t even turn 18 until a month after the Pirates picked him. A year later, and Tucker is playing in full season ball with the West Virginia Power, and he’ll be younger than some of the players drafted tonight.
From my perspective, that means that the only real analysis for me to do on draft day is to ask whether or not I trust the Pirates’ process. Evaluating draft strategy is hard, too, because there’s always a temptation to view drafts in a vacuum. It’s easy to look at Neal Huntington’s first draft and say it wasn’t a great one, because picking Pedro Alvarez over Buster Posey was a mistake. That 2008 draft, though, gave the Pirates half of their starting infield, in Alvarez and Jordy Mercer, and it gave them Justin Wilson, who was later traded for Francisco Cervelli. That means that the starting shortstop, catcher, and first baseman on a contending team in 2015 are directly attributable to that 2008 draft. It’s hard to call that a bad result.
The 2009 draft is widely maligned because Tony Sanchez has more or less flopped and because all of the well-regarded over-slot starting pitchers that they took in middle rounds of that draft have certainly flopped. Even that draft gave them pieces for the Wandy Rodriguez, Marlon Byrd, and Mark Melancon trades, though, and I think it can be argued that the 2009 draft was the beginning of the process that ultimately resulted in Tyler Glasnow and Nick Kingham. Saying that all of the over-slot high school pitchers drafted in 2009 flopped obviously makes that draft look bad, but saying that the Pirates started focusing on over-slot high school pitchers in 2009 and that focus has resulted in Kingham and Glasnow over the years re-casts it a bit. That’s obviously glossing over things a bit, but if you focus more on larger process than the immediate results and look at those 2009 picks as part of a larger high school pitching focus, I’m not sure it’s necessarily a bad way to look at the 2009 draft.
And so you move on to 2010, where two of the Bucs’ first four picks (Taillon and Kingham) were on most Top 100 prospect lists this year, although both of their futures (and thus the legacy of that draft) will be determined by Tommy John Surgery rehab. In 2011 they picked Cole, Glasnow, and Josh Bell. The 2012 draft will never look great because of the failed Mark Appel gambit, but Max Moroff is doing interesting things in Double-A and you might see Adrian Sampson in Pittsburgh sooner than you expect with all of the pitching depth injuries the Pirates have suffered. The Pirates made up for the Appel whiff in 2013 by taking Austin Meadows and Reese McGuire in the first round. Two years later, both players look like very legitimate prospects. It’s far too early to say much about last year’s draft, though I will say that the Pirates’ aggressive placement of Tucker this year is really fascinating to me. Lots of people suggested last year that Tucker was a “signability” pick, but the Pirates were adamant from the get-go that he was not, and they haven’t treated him like one at all.
The Pirates have certainly made some bad draft picks under Neal Huntington and Greg Smith, and they’ve definitely had some bad drafts. You could probably argue that none of their drafts have been singularly spectacular, though the 2011 draft could certainly look that way in a couple of years. That doesn’t mean that they’re bad at drafting, though, and that doesn’t mean that their approach is wrong. They have a very good baseball team in Pittsburgh this year, which has been made possible in part by the Huntington/Smith drafts. They still have a very good farm system, with most of their top prospects being Huntington/Smith draft picks. Taken as one very large whole picture from 2008-2014, it seems to me like the Pirate draft process is working.
Anyway, the Pirates pick 19th and 32nd (in compensation for losing Russell Martin) this year, so it’s awfully hard to know who they’re going to pick. They’ve been linked, from what I’ve seen, to high school pitchers and college pitchers and position players, which really narrows it down. Certainly, no one had Cole Tucker on their radar at this point last year. Bucs Dugout has a good draft primer up today that you should check out. Pirates Prospects (subscription) is, of course, invaluable at this time of year — here’s John Dreker’s draft preview. I’ll do my best to update with the Pirates’ first few picks tonight, trying to pick at the seams a little bit and figure out what the Pirates are looking for in this year’s picks. We’ll know eventually whether they’re good draft picks or not, but we won’t know tonight.
