5 Key Takeaways from the 2018 MLB Draft
The Major League Baseball draft wrapped up on Wednesday at MLB Network’s studios in New Jersey. The Cardinals selected outfielder Jeremy Ydens with the 1,216th — and last — overall pick.
Here are five things you need to know about all that happened in this week’s draft:
1: Auburn pitcher Casey Mize went number one after being undrafted out of high school.
There are probably a few teams kicking themselves that they didn’t get a bargain several years ago when every MLB team passed up the righty who was picked first by the Detroit Tigers this year. Mize, who was the number-five draft prospect heading into the 2018 season, made himself a number one thanks to his excellent control and the fact that he’s almost ready for the big leagues.
“Mize shows versatility and imagination with a mix of four pitches, and his dazzling strikeout-to-walk ratio is a testament to his command of all of them,” ESPN reported. “But it’s his self-control — along with his ability to control a baseball — that takes him to a different level.”
Mize is the first player to go undrafted out of high school then go first in the draft since some guy named Stephen Strasburg that the Nationals picked back in 2009. (Wonder if that guy ever made something of himself.) However, scouts say that going to college was a good decision for Mize, no matter how humbling the experience may have been.
“He’s a very typical case of a kid with good size who hadn’t quite filled out and proven an ability to repeat or hold his velocity and his inconsistencies with his secondary stuff,” one talent scout said of Mize’s high school skill. “You could see it coming, but kids generally in this part of the country go to SEC-land rather than sign for fifth- or sixth-round money.” He’s going for a lot more than that now.
2: Teams this year preferred college-seasoned talent as opposed to high schoolers.
In fact, the first five picks were collegiate: Mize, Georgia Tech catcher Joey Bart (San Francisco Giants), Wichita State third baseman Alex Bohm (Philadelphia Phillies), Oregon State second baseman Nick Madrigal (Chicago White Sox) and University of Florida third baseman Jonathan India (Cincinnati Reds) all attended at least some college. The first high schooler picked was Jarred Kelenic of Waukesha (Wisconsin) West High by the New York Mets.
It’s the first time that this has happened since 2006, CBS Sports pointed out, although then it was somewhat of a technicality; Tennessee’s Luke Hochevar, the first pick, didn’t attend the school in 2006. He’d actually played that season in the independent leagues after he didn’t agree on terms with the Dodgers, who had drafted him the previous year. The last time collegiate picks who were still attending their school went one through five in a previous draft was 1992, when the Houston Astros selected Cal State Fullerton third baseman Phil Nevin with their first pick.
If you’re Jarred Kelenic, you should probably cheer up: The first high school picks in 1992 and 2006 were guys named Derek Jeter and Clayton Kershaw. Kelenic — described as having “outstanding bat speed” and being a “defensive force” in the outfield by SB Nation — is in pretty good company.
3: The University of Oklahoma’s Kyler Murray still went ninth even though he’s going to be going back in the fall to play football.
Murray, an outfielder, went to the Oakland Athletics even though he’s going to go back to school to replace Baker Mayfield — the first pick in the NFL draft — as quarterback for the Sooners.
Murray doesn’t have an NFL future. He’s 5’10”, far shorter than NFL teams are generally looking for, and he lacks the polish that the Heisman Trophy-winning Mayfield showed on the field. If he’s going to be playing in the pros, it’s clearly going to be in the MLB. “I don’t say these things lightly, but, yeah, he will be an All-Star,” Oklahoma baseball coach Skip Johnson told Bleacher Report.
However, he’s also going to still be a winner on the college gridiron. “He’s going to break all my records,” Mayfield said. “He’s that good.”
There was plenty of pre-draft speculation as to whether or not Murray’s decision to go back and play football this fall would affect his draft standing. After all, the verdant fields of the Big 12 gridiron aren’t exactly the coddling you want your top prospect to be receiving; if you’re a manager, you’d probably prefer them in the trainer’s room of your triple-A affiliate.
This is combined with the fact that Murray hasn’t played a full season of baseball since high school and has a lifetime collegiate average under .270; he’s mostly a package of pure potential, one that most scouts believed will improve hugely once he focuses on a single sport. Johnson himself had said that “when he gets to the point where he’s playing baseball full-time — because baseball is his future — and when he learns all about the game, his ceiling is limitless.”
The question was, given Murray’s enormous talent, how early a team was going to bite on that package. The answer was, pretty darn early.
4: The Kansas City Royals may have gotten the steal of the draft by taking University of Florida pitcher Brady Singer with the 18th overall pick.
Singer, a righty, threw 88 innings with a 2.25 ERA and 92 strikeouts compared with 18 bases on balls this spring. That had many tipping him as the top pick in the draft. However, CBS Sports said two things had the pitcher tumbling down the boards.
The first was the cost of his bonus. Singer was said to be looking for a bonus equivalent to that of a top pick no matter where he went in the draft. Once he got out of the top five, this meant that a lot of teams were skittish about picking him, particularly given their bonus pool. The bonus pool essentially functions as a kind of salary cap for the draft, one that limits what teams can spend on signing bonuses.
However, the Royals were able to overcome this: They’d lost two free agents in Eric Hosmer and Lorenzo Cain, meaning extra picks and a bonus pool of $12,781,900, the largest in either league. That meant they could take a flyer on the fast-throwing Gator.
The second was the fact that there was some risk to Singer, who has an unusually low delivery. A low arm slot can make a changeup difficult to throw correctly, even though it’s one of the three pitches Singer currently has in his arsenal.
The Sporting News also noted a few additional issues with Singer, all to do with his ceiling. What you see with Singer may be very close to what you get, given how advanced his three pitches — fastball, slider and changeup — are. He could be a back-of-the-rotation pitcher or perhaps start off in the bullpen, but he’s not a one or a two for any team, at least at the moment. Given that Singer had also been picked high out of high school in 2015, there are probably going to be questions as to whether or not he should have taken the money then. That said, the Royals definitely got a steal in the middle of the first round.
5: The most controversial player in the draft, Oregon State’s Luke Heimlich, went undrafted.
Heimlich, a left-handed pitcher, was supposed to go high in the 2017 draft until the Oregonian revealed just days before that he had pleaded guilty when he was 16 to molesting his niece between the ages of 4 and 16.
Heimlich has denied the crime, saying he had just pleaded guilty to avoid jail time and to end a trying period for his family. Teams didn’t buy it then, especially since he had originally said when the story broke that he had “taken responsibility for my conduct” as a teenager, and they apparently didn’t buy it this year.
If he can get someone in an independent minor league somewhere to buy his story or look past it, he’ll certainly be difficult to overlook. He led the country with a 13-1 record and recorded 129 strikeouts this year. However, some clubs have publicly said they would never look at Heimlich (the Texas Rangers are the most prominent) and it’s very difficult to sympathize with someone who refuses to take responsibility for his actions, even though they may have been committed as a minor. Perhaps teams will look at Heimlich once the spotlight is off of him, but for now, his future in baseball seems consigned to ignominy.
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