Are More Shortstops Being Taken in the First Round? Or Is That Just What the Government Wants You to Think?

I write to you, dear readers, during the interregnum between the All-Star Game and the second half of the season. Soon enough, the focus of every baseball writer in North America will be on the trade deadline, and after that, the stretch run before the playoffs. The season is basically over already; goodness, how the time flies.

Having spent most of the past month concentrating on the draft and the NCAA tournament, I’m not quite ready to let go of that fun midseason diversion. So I’ll spend that interregnum the way I spent the rest of the All-Star break: working the draft query tool on Baseball Reference. Today, we’re going to talk about shortstops.

In Wednesday’s column on first-round catchers, I discussed at some length the logic behind spending early picks on up-the-middle prospects. If the player hits and stays at a premium position, that’s great. If he can only contribute on one side of the ball, that’s still frequently a useful big leaguer. There’s just so much more room for developmental error for shortstops and center fielders than there is for first basemen. And it seems MLB teams agree; in the first round of this past week’s draft, 14 shortstops went off the board, an all-time record.

This isn’t exactly an aberration. The 2021 draft also set a new record for first-round shortstops, with 11. The record before that was nine, set in 2019. Put the number of shortstops in a line graph, and it looks like a win probability chart in a game where one team’s closer gets the yips.

There are some obvious confounding variables in an analysis of almost 60 years’ worth of drafts. Scouting is far more systematized than it was in the 1960s, for starters. But the first round of the draft is also longer. In the first Rule 4 draft in 1965, there were 20 first-round picks, because, you know, there were only 20 teams back then. Over the years, that has expanded due to compensation picks, particularly the way B-Ref measures it, to include all picks before the second round. This year, that included competitive balance round A, as well as a prospect promotion incentive pick for the Mariners, 29th overall, for Julio Rodríguez coming up and winning AL Rookie of the Year. (I do this for a living and I had to double-check what PPI stood for.)

So to account for some of the draft bloat (which is different from the draft bloat you get after having five pints of Yuengling when watching March Madness at a Buffalo Wild Wings), I checked the annual shortstop haul for the top 100 picks of the draft. Depending on the year, that could come as early as the third round or as late as the end of the fifth. Even so, we’re still drafting more shortstops now than before.

The 2023 draft was also peculiar at the top; as much as the best college arms carried this class, it was an odd year for pitching. In the every draft for the previous 44 years, at least one college lefthander went in the first round; that streak ended on Sunday, as Wake Forest’s Sean Sullivan had to wait until the 46th pick to hear his name. And only one high school pitcher, Noble Meyer, came off the board in the first round. Fewer pitchers being drafted means more opportunities for shortstops. The idiosyncrasies of this class notwithstanding, I’m convinced that someone is getting wise to the advantages of going up-the-middle early in the draft. But the reason might not be as straightforward as you’d think.

Obviously, not all shortstop prospects remain there. In the very first draft, in 1965, the first shortstop picked who turned out to be worth a damn was Amos Otis, who never played a game at the position in the majors. He slid all the way down the defensive spectrum to… not that far, actually; he won three Gold Gloves as a center fielder.

Others fall further. Justin Upton was the no. 1 overall pick in 2005 as a 17-year-old high school shortstop. By the time he was 19, he’d reached the majors, but he’d also moved out to right field. Michael Cuddyer and Gary Sheffield were first-round shortstops, God bless them. But that’s why you go with up-the-middle talent; there’s a long way to fall defensively before the player has to move to DH.

And we’re now in a golden age of giant shortstops. Carlos Correa and Corey Seager stayed on the position. So did Oneil Cruz, who’s probably been bigger than Ozzie Smith since middle school. Big ballplayers are now athletic enough to stay not only on the dirt but also up the middle, so a player with corner outfield size and power could credibly call himself a shortstop in the draft.

Some shortstops from this draft class might move to other positions before they hit the majors, but they still come by their current designation honestly. Arjun Nimmala, for instance, is so young we don’t know what he’ll look like when he’s big league ready, but at this moment he can absolutely play short. But among the 13 other first-round shortstops, certain others are straining credulity a little.

The second shortstop off the board, Stanford’s Tommy Troy, got some time at short in the Cape Cod League last summer but played mostly third base in his draft year. The Rays announced TCU third baseman Brayden Taylor as a shortstop, and to be fair, he did make 10 appearances at the position over three years in Fort Worth, against 167 at third base. Maybe the Rays will do some kind of math and player development magic on Taylor and turn him into the second coming of Andrelton Simmons; failing that, they might as well dispense with the pretense.

But it’s easy to understand why a player and his camp would try to stretch the truth regarding defensive upside. At the combine, I had a pleasant conversation with Aidan Miller, who went 27th overall to the Phillies. I had concerns about the offensive requirements that Miller — already a power-hitting third baseman as a high school senior — might have to live up to should he have to slide over to first base in the pros. He was quick to insist that not only was he confident he could play third base, but also that he’d come to Phoenix intent on convincing teams that he could play shortstop in the majors. And sure enough, that’s what he was introduced as on Sunday night. We’ll see if he can stay there.

It’s also in the teams’ interest to paint a rosy picture of their new draft picks. A little finesse never hurt anyone, but we’ve seen some teams abuse the public’s credulity in that respect. In 2020, the Tigers spent the first overall pick on Spencer Torkelson. The first thing Tork did in college was break Arizona State’s freshman home run record, which had been set by Barry Bonds. As elevator pitches for draft picks go, “Broke a home run record set by Barry Bonds” is one of the best I can think of. But when the Tigers announced Torkelson, they got a little greedy: the draft card read “third base,” a position he had never played, either in two-plus seasons of college ball or in two trips to the Cape Cod League.

Now, a 6-foot-1 right-handed college first baseman is a troubling profile for the no. 1 overall pick, so the Tigers would have been wise to pursue even a remote possibility that Torkelson could handle the hot corner. The experiment commenced the following spring, in his first season of minor league ball, and lasted all of 43 games. Fielding percentage doesn’t give a comprehensive look into a player’s defense, yada yada, but in 27 games of third base in Double-A, he posted a fielding percentage of .854.

So yes, it’s easier for bigger athletes to play tougher positions. And yes, teams are as cognizant as ever of the value of an up-the-middle prospect. But a big part of the seeming rush on shortstops in this draft is the result of clever branding. Maybe teams are just being optimistic about their new prospects. Or maybe they’re just lying to everyone.