Picking at #64 and #73, the Pirates took two high school pitchers in the second round of the 2014 draft. With the #64 pick, they took Mitch Keller, a righty from Iowa who has a commitment to pitch at UNC (which I hear is a nice school) in 2015. At #73, they took Trey Supak, a righty from the same high school as Homer Bailey, who’s committed to Houston. Both of them seem like more typical Neal Huntington targets; they’re tall, lanky pitchers and when you read about them you read words like “projectable” and “downhill”
Both guys are ranked in Baseball America’s Top 100 (Keller is #76 and Supak is #99, though as Tim notes, Keith Law is much higher on Supak than a lot of other people), and the college commitments may mean that some of the money saved by the Pirates with their first two picks can go towards getting Supak and Keller to sign.
Before I sign off for the night, I wanted to link to Neal Huntington’s comments about Cole Tucker’s age that I thought were interesting. Basically, if the Pirates see Tucker as a guy that’s just starting to come into his own as one of the younger players in the draft, it’s easy to see why they’d have him valued higher than a lot of the draft boards did. It’s something to think about, at least, and I’ll probably post a bit more about this in the morning. For now, though, it’s bed time.
