2024 MLB Draft: Day Two and Three Roundup

The 2024 MLB Draft has concluded, and it’s time to make definitive judgments about which teams did the best and worst before many of the players have even signed their deals. Just kidding — while I do have a few team-specific thoughts below, this piece is more about what unfolded across the draft as a whole. I texted folks in the industry (scouts, executives, and agents) to see what they thought of the overall results, and if they noticed a continuation of broad industry trends or observed behavior specific to this year’s proceedings. I’ve incorporated some of their thoughts below.

Teams Leaning On College Contact Hitters

If there was a universal response from team personnel over the last couple of days about this draft, it was that, especially on Day Two, teams prioritized college hitters who had demonstrated bat-to-ball ability. Rutgers shortstop Joshua Kuroda-Grauer (A’s) and Texas Tech catcher Kevin Bazzell (Nationals) got things kicked off in the third round, and then players who either need a swing change, like Oklahoma State’s Zach Ehrhard (Red Sox, fourth round), or to get much stronger, like Eli Serrano (Mets, fourth round), were also frequent Day Two selections. There’s a growing number of teams that would rather have contact skills on board to start and then try to add or augment other stuff, like strength or swing mechanics, later. The general sentiment is that hitting is harder to teach. This isn’t universal (the Orioles took Vance Honeycutt in the first round), and I think it can easily be argued that having an up-the-middle defensive fit (especially the athleticism to play shortstop or center field) is every bit as innate and probably scarcer. Another variable that seems to have motivated this reasoning brings me to my second overarching theme…

The Changing Run Environment in College Baseball Has Made Power (and Other Traits) Tougher to Trust and Evaluate

There have been pieces written about this elsewhere, and it was a common refrain among team personnel during the lead up to the draft and after. Whatever is altering the run environment (there are some industry rumors/conspiracy theories about bat juicing in college baseball), it won’t affect whether or not a hitter makes contact. Hitting a baseball is often referred to as the hardest thing to do in professional sports, and as pitchers get better and better, finding guys who can actually do it is a league-wide priority. I do think we’re riding the asymptote of pitcher development as far as quantum leaps in technique are concerned and that hitter dev is starting to catch up, but orgs can still apply pitching dev methodology to arm after arm.

The Mariners’ Draft

This is the second year in a row that the Mariners’ pursuit of over-slot high schoolers meant they pivoted to older players earlier than other clubs. While their 2023 class yielded more young players because they had so many picks, this year’s Ryan Sloan selection in the second round (he could be more than $2 million over slot) led them to several 23-ish-year-old seniors and grad students on Day Two. Kansas reliever Hunter Cranton (upper 90s with plus-flashing slider — he’s going to move quickly), Oregon righty Brock Moore (moved into starter role late in the season and held 94-96), and two-way player Grant Knipp (one of the hardest throwers at the Combine, 95-97) were the more prominent of the six seniors they selected. I’ve written this before: There’s value in being the first team to start taking these guys because you get the best ones. Usually when you draft big-bonus high schoolers, you end up with a top-heavy class and are at risk of being light on depth. The Mariners avoided that.

We Just Had the Fewest High School Players Drafted, Ever

At least, within 20 rounds, excluding the five-round 2020 draft. Some of this is specific to the talent makeup of this class, which was light on high schoolers. You know the feeling you get when you first open a bag of chips and see how few are actually in there? That’s what is felt like scouting this high school class last summer.

There are other forces at play here as well. Player development is more costly now because of necessary changes made to how minor leaguers are paid and housed. MLB has slashed away 60 minor league affiliates from its clubs’ farm systems in response to the increase in per player cost, and also cut the draft in half, from 40 rounds to 20. A reduction in minor league roster spots and the lack of post-draft, short-season affiliates (the old Northwest, Appalachian, and Pioneer Leagues), where newly drafted college players often began their careers, creates a talent bottlenecking effect at the college level. Major League Baseball (note the capitalization — I’m referring to the business entity here) has an incentive to outsource player development to college baseball, and it’s a symbiotic relationship because the NCAA would love to have a more talented and watchable “product.”

I’ve asked people if the pull of NIL money in college is part of the equation, and while it certainly is as far as choosing a school and navigating the transfer portal is concerned, people with big league teams have consistently told me that the new money flying around college baseball hasn’t really impacted their ability to sign players. Colleges have offered some players a lot of money to transfer or stay at their school (the highest rumored amount is in the mid-six figures), but even if, say, Texas A&M is offering you $500,000 or so to stick around, if the Angels draft you in the third round, your bonus is going to be much bigger than that.

The Brewers’ Draft

The Brewers followed up on their high school-heavy 2023 draft with an even younger group this year, and it reveals an interesting strategy. Their first round pick, Braylon Payne, was generally seen as a second-round prospect. His bonus is likely to be well below the $4.5 million slot value of his pick, with some amount of the excess pool space diverted to the high school pitching prospects they selected in the second and Comp B rounds, New Jersey high schoolers Bryce Meccage and Chris Levonas. They also popped high schoolers in rounds nine and 10, and then took several on Day Three. Not all of these guys are going to sign but several of them will. Recall last year that Brewers got Cooper Pratt’s deal done for $1.3 million in the sixth round and then also signed multiple high schoolers for between $250,000-$550,000 on Day Three of the draft. Day Three picks don’t have bonus slots that reduce your team’s pool if the player doesn’t sign, so aside from a little opportunity cost (the college guy they’d have otherwise taken in round 14 or whatever), the Brewers can now negotiate with a bunch of higher-upside high school players between now and the signing deadline and decide what combination of bonuses and players gives them the best overall class.

Several teams do a version of this every year, but nobody does it to this degree. Whether it was precipitated by the nature of this particular draft class or just how the board fell in the first round (i.e. the Brewers didn’t like who was left on the board, so they pivoted to this strategy), we just don’t know.

High School Pitching Is The Rags

Is it possible teams are valuing high school pitching less and less as time goes on, and that we’ve now hit some kind of bottom? In a draft that was the deepest in high school arms among all the player demographics, the best one (in my opinion), William Schmidt, decided to pull his name out and go to LSU rather than be drafted. The next-best one, Cam Caminiti, had an “unexpected” fall and was the first high school pitcher chosen at pick 24 in a weaker draft. (I had Caminiti ranked 21st, so while my draft night chat was losing its mind that he was falling, he went about where I had him.)

The time it takes high school pitchers to develop (both from a technical perspective and from a durability standpoint) and the risk that they won’t (think about how different pitching once a week for two-and-half months is compared to a full-season pro workload) is influencing team behavior. And maybe less than “team behavior,” it’s affecting “decision-maker behavior.” You can’t play if you don’t have a seat at the table, and I do think more frequently the self-interest of executives is trumping teams’ best interests. If you have one or two years to save your job, why take a high school player who won’t be ready for another five? I don’t think every team or executive is behaving this way (Pittsburgh needs good big league hitters ASAP, yet they took Konnor Griffin and several other high schoolers despite the risk/time element because they believe in the talent), but the number is growing.

Groupthink on the Rise

Another common response from industry personnel this year was something like, “We are all making decisions looking at the same data and, increasingly, based on similar interpretations of that data.” This intersects with the college contact hitter point above. Teams are looking at fastball vertical approach angle and hitters’ contact and chase rates, and they have regression models that are fed the same data as their competitors’ models, in part because MLB (and its cheaper owners) wanted to avoid an arms race in this space. People in successful organizations diffuse to bad ones when the bad ones make a new GM or POBO hire, and the methodology of the successful orgs spreads to the crummier teams. This is happening faster than individual teams can make a leap in scouting or dev, and we’re approaching a sort of equilibrium where the competitive advantages will be mined from the interpersonal nooks and crannies of this process and the strategy with which teams pick. I think you could argue that orgs that are less inclined to adhere to data-based methods are in a better position now than ever before because the many data-driven teams end up competing for the same players. If there’s a science- or analytics-driven gap between teams, it’s in the way player development is considered as they determine their draft targets.