M’s Go with RHP Stephen Pryor at #162
Another college pitcher, this one a bit of an unknown relative to everyone else that’s been on the board so far. Pryor is out of Tennessee Tech, a transfer from Cleveland State. He’s another 6’4 guy, but considerably heavier than the other two we’ve seen thus far. He’s a reliever who has gained traction of late, recently gaining control over his body, and will pump in fastballs in the mid-90s while touching in the high-90s. The slider is still a work in progress, as he only picked it up after having trouble with his curve. Overall results were inconsistent for him, however. He could move fast and work his way into the bullpen within two or three years if everything breaks right for him.
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I was looking for information on him, and each more recently-updated web page on Pryor listed a higher weight than the last. The first one listed 220, then 230, then 235. The picture on the last one shows a big boy…
Big bodied, late bloomer destined for relief? Sounds like a Fontaine pick.
Manuel says that Pryor had 16.2 k’s per 9 this season.
I’s say that more on the transfer, DNC, but he does remind me of the Lowe and Kahn picks that happened around the same time in the past.
Pryor, like Paxton, had so-so RA/ERA numbers but great Ks and a very good K:BB ratio.
Runs allowed in college baseball can be deceiving. Give me a player with really good stuff, and then see how they do in front of professional defenders. Doesn’t hurt if the ERA thing makes him cheaper to sign.
dnc – EXCEPT he was picked in the 5th round, rather than the 1st or 2nd…. Gotta love that K rate (I read 57 K’s in 30 innings), and apparently he was hitting 98 this year, but he was only 3-3 with a 5.04 ERA.
I was thinking Mickolio (though he’s not that big).
Any idea what his walk rate was to go with those k’s?
Jay, are the M’s too focused on pitching so far? Seems like they need position players as much as pitchers, and maybe more.
Pete – I wasn’t referring to Aumont or Morrow (who we thought was a starter at the time). Fields was drafted to be a reliever, but he was tiny.
It was the Kahn, Lowe, Mickolio, types that this one reminds me of.
Apparently I looked at stats not fully updated through the whole year (he finished at 4-4, with a 5.71 ERA, according to Stone, who has a nice write-up)
charliebrown, if you look at our minor league system I’d say just the opposite. We need pitchers MUCH more than hitters. That said, we’re much better off not drafting for need. The first three pitchers were all higher ranked than their draft location (two of them significantly) – the position player was the big reach.
If we can keep getting great value for our draft slots, I don’t care what if all we take is pitchers.
dnc – if he works out like Lowe and Mickolio, that’d be OK with me. 🙂
And remember, once the restocking of the farm system starts, we can always do trades of pitchers for bats.
And charliebrown, if you remember, last year the M’s focused more on offense than pitching.
COnsidering most people on here know more than me I’ll take your words for it.
It just seems to me that the M’s are struggling mightily at the plate and if they don’t use the draft to upgrade the offense, then it has to com via free agency or trades.
Considering that this offseason the M’s big trade was for a pitcher and they only signed one plaer (Figgins) with a reasonable chance of improving the offense it doesn’t seem like the M’s are willing to spend many resources in Free Agency or trades to upgrade an offense that needs upgrading.
I guess I was hoping for more picks to try to upgrade the offense via the farm system.
Not too bad. I was expecting something like the HindenJoba
Sorry about the typos. I can’t edit from here for some reason.
I have to say I’ve been quite pleased with the M’s draft so far.
I was kind of disappointed when they didn’t take J-Pax with their 99th pick, but as you can probably guess I got over that pretty quickly.
This draft was always going to be about getting a relatively sure thing with the 43rd pick and then relying on your scouting department to fill organizational needs; And this organization desperately needed some lower and mid-level pitching talent.
Even if some of this years crop doesn’t pan out, the M’s will have far more valuable picks next year, with a much stronger class of more advanced pitching.
For those upset that the M’s weren’t looking to offensive players in the draft, rest easy. They’ve taken a HS catcher from Hawaii (Christian “Keanu” Carmichael, apparently the top prep prospect in Hawaii who is considered a defensive catcher) in the 6th, and a left-handed hitting college 1B (Maguire Wiswall, out of Boston College) in the 7th round.
It seems like a lot of folks bring an NFL mentality to the MLB draft — which is understandable, since it’s been in the public consciousness (and the ESPN hype-machine) for much longer. But the MLB draft is a very different beast: you can’t trade picks, and you can’t expect immediate results.
These guys are at least three years away. Any improvement to the offense better happen before that (or it’s going to be a long three years, yes?) It’s true the M’s are struggling mightily at the plate right now, and no one is more painfully aware of that than the front office; but this draft was never going to have any effect on that. You try to take the best players available at the time, and then fill in the holes. Trying to draft for need on the major-league team rarely works, because even in the best case the player is going to need some time in the minors (just look at Ackley, the “best pure hitter in the draft” last year, who is just now coming around to hitting well with wood bats in AA); and in the worst case you get yourself into a situation like Jeff Clement, where you end up having to go with plan B anyway.
In any case, the best trades happen when teams exchange excess for excess, dealing from strength. There’s nothing wrong with having more pitchers in the system, because they’re even more of a crapshoot than position players and (consequently) everybody’s always looking for pitching.