2012 5th-Round Pick: SS Chris Taylor
While listening to the talking heads on MLB.com (actually, I was listening to the other Talking Heads earlier… “Whoooo… who is it, whoooo… who is it, whooooo…”) they suggested Taylor as a kind of poor man’s Deven Marrero. This is intriguing to me in that in the pre-season, before Marrero turned out to be bad at hitting, I thought of linking him to the M’s.
The reason for this comparison? Well, Taylor has great defensive tools, good speed, and that’s the main way he generates value as a player. He’s not really a great bat, since he’s only recorded seven home runs in his college career. He’s reliable for doubles though, with thirty-four of those for the career (thirteen this season) and he’s ranked second on the team in walks right now with thirty-five. He’s been a leadoff guy for the Cavaliers, and one might expect him at either the top or bottom of the order as a pro.
This is a pick that I feel a little bit more confident about in context because the Mariners presumably saw a lot of him last season when they were tracking Hultzen/Hicks/Proscia.
2012 4th-Round Pick: 3B Patrick Kivlehan
Kivlehan. Kivlehan’s story is just strange. While at Rutgers, he focused on football. That was his thing. Then this spring, he decided to try out for the baseball team. He made it. He also won the Big East’s Triple Crown by hitting .399/.484/.710. It was the first time any Big East player took the triple crown. He also won Big East Player of the Year. That College Splits link I had for Zunino? Revisit it and you’ll find that Kivlehan’s adjusted numbers were better than Zunino’s.
I don’t have video on Kivlehan. I don’t really know what most of his non-hitting tools are like, though his hitting tools are supposedly pretty good. I don’t know how his arm strength plays at third, or how his hands are. Supposedly he has enough footspeed to get a look in the outfield, since he stole twenty-four bases, which was third in the conference. I don’t really know. I’m glad to have him. He’s interesting!
2012 3rd-Round Comp. Pick: LHP Tyler Pike
My expectations, as established by the Mariners over the past few drafts, is that later rounds will feature a lot of picks from the same state or region as the first round pick came from. In some cases, they may even be teammates. A lot of Zunino’s relevant teammates have already been picked. The Astros used their first selection today to get one. But Florida is a big place, with a lot of players, one of which is Tyler Pike.
This pick surprised me in that one would think that with a compensation round guy, the inclination would be to go safer with a college guy and so as to avoid the risk of getting nothing if the kid doesn’t sign. Pike is a known Florida State recruit who may have been selected on the lower end of what he was willing to accept. His fastball is in the low-90s and he seems to command it well, left, right, up, down. Like a lot of left-handers, the word is that he’s more advanced in the change-up than the curve.
Good addition if he signs, though not super exciting. Solid pick.
2012 3rd-Round Pick: RHP Edwin Diaz
The draft is a mess in a lot of respects. Guys that you don’t expect to go high, go high. Guys that you don’t really expect to drop, drop. In Diaz’ case, he’s more the latter than the former, but generally a reasonable pick for the time.
Diaz at present is a skinny right-hander who has hit the mid-to-high 90s a few times. More commonly, he’ll sit lower than that. Watching his mechanics is an interesting experience: he’s all spindly limbs out there and the effect is exaggerated by the fact that, in his landing, he drifts and falls over to the first base side. It’s a quick motion once he gets into it, not quite over the top, a bit to the right. One would think that as he fills out and gets his body under control, the quirks of the delivery will even out and he’ll start to look more normal-ish. For now, the reports are that his command falls short, unsurprising if the mechanics are falling apart on him.
Once he gets the delivery squared away, he’ll still have some work ahead of him developing the secondary offerings. Sometimes the curveball has depth. Sometimes it doesn’t. And the change-up? As mysterious as it commonly is with young pitchers. This and the motion lead some to suggest relief work for him. I would be shocked if the Mariners didn’t have him starting for at least two or three years, particularly considering that he’s somewhat new to pitching. There’s no reason to rush judgment on him.
Factoid: He’s a cousin of Jose Melendez, who pitched for the Mariners in the early 90s. Melendez, after being picked up on waivers by the hated Padres, was traded for Phil Plantier, who was a coach/hitting coordinator for the Mariners minor league system from 2008 to 2010. Most recently, Plantier returned as the hitting coach for the hated Padres.
2012 2nd-Round Pick: SS Joe DeCarlo
It is early and things are still surreal for me. The Mariners selected SS Joe DeCarlo out of a Pennsylvania high school. I don’t think we usually have a big scouting presence in Pennsylvania.
DeCarlo is one of those shortstops that looks like he’ll probably move off. I’ve only seen a little bit of and he’s a big kid who looks a little stiff out there so far as range goes. Otherwise the hands and whatnot look to be solid enough to keep him at the hot corner. Good transfers, quick about it. It’s really only footspeed where he’s lacking.
Offensively, he looks like he could put up some numbers in the power department, and it isn’t just because he’s big. The swing looks pretty good and he gets it through the zone pretty quickly. He stands pretty upright in the box and finishes his swing rather high at times, which is interesting. With limited data on him, I don’t know that I can comment on his plate discipline or other important things like that.
No word yet on how this selection affects his presidential campaign.
Game 57, Mariners at Angels
Vargas vs. Santana, 7:05 pm PDT
Gosh, there’s some baseball on today, isn’t there? On the TV and the radio and everything.
RF Ichiro!
2B Ackley
3B Seager
1B Smoak
DH Jaso
LF Carp
C Olivo
CF Saunders
SS Kawasaki
With a right-hander on the mound, the Mariners are going with their lefty-heavy lineup. One might prefer Montero considering he’s had multiple hits in four of his last six games, but Olivo is still around and he hit the dinger yesterday. Let Zunino’s being drafted serve as a reminder that the sun will soon set on the second Miguel Olivo Era.
Smoakamotive won AL Player of the Week. I hope he continues to chug along.
Mike Zunino: Catcher, Mariners First-Round Pick
With the third overall pick in the 2012 draft, the Seattle Mariners selected C Mike Zunino out of University of Florida. Incidentally, Zunino also went to Mariner High School in Cape Coral, Florida. I found this out some months ago and thought about it at the time, but of course I couldn’t have known then that we’d have the added weirdness of him being picked by the Mariners. Now I know that he did, well, gosh, I hope that his old high school gear still sort of fits, but that sure seems unlikely.
The comparisons that some have made, reflecting back on the 2005 draft, is between Zunino and Jeff Clement. This is a lazy way of going about things. For one, Clement was more about the power bat back then, holding the career high school home run record at the national level. If injuries hadn’t derailed him, we might have seen more of that. Second is that much of the talk at the time about Clement pertained to the fact that he had improved his work behind the plate a lot, which is a roundabout way of saying that, for the time, it wasn’t great. Maybe it was even not-good.
There aren’t really any complaints about Zunino’s catching ability, seeing as how he’s been voted to the All-SEC Defensive team twice. He gets up quickly, throws well, doesn’t have too many issues with how his skills show back there. This is all interesting to me in that he hasn’t been a career catcher all the way through. He started to play there when he was eleven, but was a shortstop back in his freshman year in high school just because that was what the team needed. He’s not exactly up there with the elite defensive catchers of baseball history, but he’s proficient at what he does and proficiency behind the plate seems harder to come by these days. In this case, Zunino couples that with good leadership grades and the ability to handle a pitching staff. Zunino was able to call his own games this season, which doesn’t seem like all that much, but it’s rather uncommon for college baseball.
I’ve watched a little bit of Zunino at the plate, and he seems to stand a little bit crouched in there. There’s a cut to his swing, but at the same time he manages to adjust to the pitched ball pretty well. The scouting type people seem to give him above-average grades on both hitting and power, and again, those aren’t easy to come by from solid defensive catchers. Just like from the defensive side, he was first team ALL-SEC and was their Player of the Year last year while being named a finalist for the Johnny Bench award. Among the categories he led the conference in last season: total bases, hits, runs, doubles (tied), and home runs. The numbers this year haven’t been as eye-popping, but as Jeff Sullivan pointed out, pull up College Splits and adjust for park and schedule and suddenly he has the fourth-best adjusted OPS/wOBA in the country. All the while, he had a .311 BABIP, which is almost a hundred points lower than it was last season. When the balls fell in for him, they had usually gone pretty far.
We’ve talked before about how the M’s front office really does their homework with their picks. That’s true of Zunino on a whole different level, as it’s been reported that Zduriencik has known Zunino’s dad for decades since Zunino’s dad is a scout. This was the information that linked the two camps in the pre-season and I guess that with Buxton and Correa both out, they went with the guy they trusted.
The larger question for me at this point is how the organization’s catching depth is implicated in this. In the same sense that Rendon last year likely would have trumped the assorted internal options we had at the hot corner, Zunino trumps all of the backstops we have, a large portion of which were drafted recently. Most of those guys came with defensive questions that Zunino just doesn’t have. As raw power goes, Marlette might still have more, but his hitting skills aren’t nearly as refined and the expected timetable for Zunino would render that an afterthought anyway. What the Mariners will probably find themselves doing in the short-term is trying to find a way to trade from that depth and moving Marder to utility. The first move may be to send Jaso elsewhere within the next year or so.
That’s the story for now. It’s a solid pick, not what some of us hoped, but there was a sizeable dropoff from the two prep hitters to whoever was next and Zunino is hopefully a franchise catcher. Now to get stronger in the outfield on day two. Hopefully.
BA: Zunino is the Midseason Most Outstanding Player
Zunino’s 9th inning HR vs. LSU 3/18/11
Zunino’s HR vs. SC 5/25/12
ESPN Draft Watch
Interview #1
Interview #2
Jack and Tom talk about the pick
2012 Draft Thread: First Round
Well, here we are. It’s really happening and I’ve barely prepared anything, mostly on purpose.
The word went around last night that the Astros are already setting up a deal with Appel. Edit: That was a lie. From there, everyone has started to conclude that the Twins are going to take Buxton, whether that has any basis in an actual deal or not. As part of the Baseball America dominoes falling, everyone has assumed that the Mariners are going to pick Mike Zunino now, even though if you read the actual article carefully, it’s phrased around speculation. Nevertheless, it’s being treated as fact at the moment. I’m hoping otherwise.
Prepare to FREAK OUT in a logical, well-reasoned, and family-friendly manner.
Edit: That’s C Mike Zunino out of Florida.
Some Thoughts on Tonight’s Draft
The first round of the Major League Draft kicks off at 4 pm today, and with the third pick in the draft, the M’s will be selecting probably around 4:15 or so. Marc and Chris Crawford ran through a lot of questions on Friday, but I wanted to weigh in with a couple of thoughts of my own before the first pick is announced tonight.
1. Anything you’ve read about what the M’s are rumored to be doing, forget it.
The Mariners front office doesn’t leak anything to anyone, and the reality is that even the most well connected writers in the industry have no idea what the Mariners plans are. Tom McNamara may have enjoyed the shock on everyone’s face when the team took Danny Hultzen last year as much as he enjoyed anything all year. Other teams may let their intentions be known to outsiders, but the Mariners simply do not, so the reality is that any rumor about what the team may be thinking is based on speculation from someone who isn’t going to be in the draft war room this afternoon. We’ll know what the M’s are doing when they do it and not before.
2. There’s a real chance that the Mariners first round pick tonight could be a pitcher.
The generally accepted top tier of the draft includes a couple of high school hitting prospects (OF Byron Buxton and SS Carlos Correa) who could theoretically both be off the board in the first two selections, and the top college hitting prospect (Mike Zunino) is a catcher who is seen as more of a good bat than a great one. It’s not that hard for me to imagine the Mariners passing on Zunino or Correa in favor of a college arm like Mark Appel, Kevin Gausman, or Kyle Zimmer if they feel that they’re more likely to make an impact in the big leagues. I don’t think they’d pass on Buxton if given the chance, but assuming he does go #1 or #2, I’d say there’s a real chance the M’s take an arm at #3.
If that’s what ends up going down, please don’t freak out. Yes, the Mariners offense is bad, and they have a lot of pitching prospects, but drafting for need is a great way to waste a top draft choice, and the construction of a team’s roster is usually quite different from the time a prospect is drafted to when they actually reach the big leagues. And, you can never have too many pitching prospects – the attrition rate and turnover is so large that every team is always in need of quality arms. Don’t just look at Felix/Hultzen/Walker/Paxton and decide that a pitching prospect would be superfluous. If the team feels that the best prospect on the board is an arm, they should take an arm.
3. Likewise, Jesus Montero’s presence should not stop them from drafting Mike Zunino.
This is the flip side of the “don’t draft based on current talent” philosophy. Yes, the team has Jesus Montero, and while he hasn’t been Disaster Catcher, there’s nothing wrong with taking another catcher and figuring out the best way to utilize your assets in a year or two. The Reds drafted Yasmani Grandal when they already had Devin Mesoraco in the organization, and when both turned into top catching prospects, they simply traded Grandal to get a piece that better fit their needs. No team is ever going to have a quality player waste away because they don’t have an opportunity to use them, either at the big league level or as a valuable trade chip, and it’s not like we know that Montero’s still going to be catching in 18 months. Zunino is probably a bit of a lower upside choice than a guy like Correa, but he’s also a lower risk selection, and it certainly wouldn’t be a waste of a pick to choose a college catcher who has a chance to be a pretty decent big league hitter.
4. If the team makes another shocking pick, that does not mean they went cheap.
One of the new wrinkles in this year’s draft is the existence of a total team spending pool, where organizations are penalized for spending more money than they are allotted based on the selections that they have in the draft. The M’s series of draft picks (11 in the top 10 rounds) have garnered them a total pool of $8.23 million to spend, of which $5.2 million is tied up with the #3 overall pick. Given the perceived similarity in value of many players at the top of the draft, there is some thought that a couple of teams may end up taking a lower value player who will sign for significantly below the recommended price, saving the team enough money to then spend more freely on their later picks. Say, for instance, the Mariners took a guy who would sign for $3 million – that $2.2 million savings could then be used on the #64/98/126 picks if the club wanted to try for a guy who was perceived to be a hard sign at lower price points.
Teams like the Tigers, Yankees, and Red Sox used to scoop up these hard sign types at the end of the first round, but the new allocation limits their ability to pay significant signing bonuses to any one player – the Yankees total pool for their first 10 rounds is just $4.2 million, for instance, so if they tried to give a kid at #30 a $3 million bonus, they’d have just $1.2 million left for their next 10 picks, and would either have to go cheap the rest of the draft or face significant penalties from Major League Baseball for going over the pool allocation.
So, if there’s a guy that the Mariners like in that 20-30 range who might want top 10-15 money, he could very well slide to #64, and if the team had saved enough on the #3 pick, they could get another first round talent with that selection. This isn’t a very likely scenario, but it’s possible that the team decides to try this approach if they don’t have a strong affection for any of the players that are going to be available early. If they do go that route, I guarantee you that there will be people out there using it as evidence that it is part of a vast conspiracy by ownership to reduce costs – don’t listen to those idiots. They don’t know what they’re talking about.
5. Don’t have too strong of an opinion about what the team should do.
I’m not big on appeals to authority, but in this case, the information gap between what the teams know and what the public knows is so vast that having any kind of strong reaction is probably not warranted. You may have a favorite prospect based on what you’ve read or the success of past similar players, but the reality is that none of us really know very much about any of these kids. While Jack Z’s history of Major League acquisitions hasn’t been fantastic, the front office has a very strong track record in the draft, and this is the thing they’re best at. If they’re higher on someone than you are, I’d bet they have a pretty decent reason for why they disagree with you. It doesn’t mean they’re right (Steve Baron, anyone?), but at the very least, we should all acknowledge that we don’t have enough information to make a strong critique one way or another. There are some things about baseball that can easily be seen and evaluated by outsiders – the value of various draft selections is not one of them.
Minor League Wrap (5/28-6/3/12)
So, this is it. Today is draft day, or the first round of draft days plural, which is annoying. Today, we will either be overjoyed or go through the Five Stages of Grief over the course a few hours and then slowly come to realize that the Mariners scouting department simply knows more than we do.
At this point, I guess I want Buxton but don’t know if we’ll get him. Failing that, Correa. I originally wrote something here about a possible alternative, but then news seems to be going around about the Astros taking Appel, so I guess they get one of the two. Or, if last year is an example, they will have their choice between the two and then select someone different. Haha, suckers. If this Astros rumbling turns out to be cruel and vicious lies, I don’t know, Zunino? Pitcher?
Here is some advice to get you through the coming days: forget everything. They don’t have a thing for hitters or pitchers. They don’t have a thing for regions beyond wherever the first pick is coming from, as others tend to follow from there. They don’t have a thing for switch hitters or left-handed hitters or right-handed hitters. They don’t prefer college players or high school players. They have a thing for the best player available to them. Kick back and let it be what it is.
At any rate, I have limited patience for hours upon hours of rumor mongering and the fact that things have been dragged out until 4 pm our time only makes it worse, so I’m working around that by being away from the computer for most of the day. I will be back before the start time to relay the latest in a series of possibly baseless conjectures.
To the jump!
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