Episode 572
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses some early-round selections in baseball’s amateur draft, the particular futures of some collegiate second baseman, and also baseball-player makeup versus regular-person makeup.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 1 min play time.)

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I already chatted for nearly six hours during last night’s picks, wrote a bunch of mock drafts and, with the help of David Appelman, made a Sortable Draft Board full of the top players with tools, reports, video and where they were taken last night, but I thought I should drop in and give some thoughts on last night’s first two rounds of the draft.

The top-11 picks went pretty much as expected, with those players all projected there in some order. Husky Canadian prep 1B Josh Naylor crashed the party, jumping from late first-round expectations to 12th overall, which was the first big surprise of the night, similar to what Kodi Medeiros did last year with the Brewers. Often, what fans will term a “reach” or “overdraft” is a team deciding they want a player and realizing he won’t be at the next pick. I support this idea from the team’s side, especially if you can save some money, because when we look back at the draft in 10 years, we won’t say “this guy wasn’t a good value here,” we’ll either say he was good or he wasn’t. Don’t forget that rankings and mock drafts are a guide, not the correct answer. When you can’t trade picks, you take the guy you want and sometimes it’ll look like this.

The rest of the first round was composed of names I had projected in that range or ranked within my top 50-60 players, except for the Orioles at pick 36 with Ryan Mountcastle, whom I heard last week had some people looking at him in the second round. Mountcastle is a unique player with above-average bat speed, bat control, raw power and speed to go with a projectable frame and a long track record of hitting, so he clearly checks a lot of boxes. His swing is a little awkward, he didn’t hit for power in games this spring and scouts think he might be a left fielder, but you can clearly see why teams would be on him with a high pick and I’m betting the Orioles wouldn’t have gotten him with their next pick.

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In an attempt to better quantify the meaningfulness of college baseball stats, I recently applied my KATOH methodology to college baseball players. You can read about the details of my methodology, my findings and some of my projections over at The Hardball Times. My piece on college hitters went up on Friday, while I dropped my analysis of college pitchers on Monday.

Now, using the KATOH models I developed, let’s take a closer look at the 13 college players who were selected in the first round of yesterday’s draft. I stopped short of including the players taken in the compensation or competitive balance rounds, but I’ll address many of these players — along with those taken in the next few rounds — in the next week or so.

Please note that my KATOH forecasts for hitters tend to run a bit higher than the ones for pitchers. For this reason, I recommend you compare hitters’ projections to only hitters, and pitchers’ projections to only pitchers.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

What follows is not that usual weekly exercise, but rather a version of it designed to identify the most compelling fringe prospects in the draft. As that same draft enters its second day, the discussion of fringe-type prospects is relevant: while the first round is generally populated by players who will develop into useful major leaugers, even the 100th-overall selection in a typical draft is expected to produce only 1-2 WAR over the entirety of his career. A club that’s able to find a Matt Carpenter (13th round, 2009) or Ben Zobrist (6th round, 2004) out of this interval of the draft is adding considerable value to its franchise where little or none is typically available.

As with the weekly editions of this exercise, central to this one is a definition of the word fringe. For the purposes of this post, a fringe prospect is any draft-eligible player absent from the April edition of Kiley McDaniel’s draft rankings — which document contains roughly 300, or about 10 rounds’ worth, of names.

In addition to McDaniel’s own work, I’ve benefited from that published recently by Chris Mitchell at the Hardball Times in which he examines predictive elements both for hitters and pitchers at the college level.

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The normal caveats apply. What follows represents a series of educated guesses. Crazy rumors were flying all over the board last night and early today. This may or may not prove I’m an idiot and/or this whole process is stupid. I opted to leave the embedded videos out of this mock, but for video on every player mentioned, tool grades and all kinds of other info, see the Sortable Draft Board.

1. D’Backs – Dansby Swanson, SS, Vanderbilt

I’m told this will be the pick, but there was discussion of Tyler Stephenson, Garrett Whitley and Tyler Jay as recently as yesterday.

2. Astros – Alex Bregman, SS, LSU

This one is still a toss-up between Bregman and Rodgers, with an outside shot of a target from 5 going here to save money to pay Daz Cameron at 37.

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Episode 569
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses draft boards of both the virtual and also all-too-real variety.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 57 min play time.)

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Episode 568
Jim Callis is both (a) a writer for MLB.com and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which he discusses Monday’s MLB Draft with guest host Kiley McDaniel and his bag of infuriating audio tricks.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 54 min play time.)

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I haven’t been one to do too many mock drafts if the information doesn’t support it. I won’t just brazenly move around names with little justification in a bid for clicks every few days. I have enough info to change enough picks now for a worthwhile read, but I’m going to do a full mock draft on Monday with the supplemental rounds and the back half of the first round, as things will be much easier to project then (although still not easy).

Clubs have told me they aren’t even discussing medical and signability info openly in their rooms until later today or this weekend and some teams in the back half of the first round haven’t even started stacking the board for their first-round pick yet, instead focusing on lower picks and positional rankings. I’ll have a much better feel for the picks beyond the top dozen on Monday, so it would be foolish to throw darts for those picks now only to reorder everything in a few days. If you’re desperate for what I think about those picks now, combine the notes below with my previous mock draft and the sortable draft board, that I updated just moments ago with the information below.

Since teams aren’t talking medical and signability info and the consensus is that the reasonably predictable part of the draft is the top 10-12 picks, that means some certainty about the injured pitchers could help shed some light on those later picks.

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It’s a pretty average year for draft-eligible talent in North Carolina, with Duke right hander Michael Matuella leading the way as a possible first-round pick, despite undergoing Tommy John surgery after just a few starts. West Columbus High School center fielder Eric Jenkins is the state’s second-best prospect, a 70-grade runner with projectable hitting tools who should go inside the top two rounds.

After those two come a sheaf (the correct collective noun for prospects) of players who grade similarly talent-wise after the third round. Among them are UNC center fielder Skye Bolt, Charlotte Christian HS right-hander Jackson Kowar, Marvin Ridge HS left-hander Max Wotell, Southpoint HS left-hander Garrett Davila and Greenfield HS outfielder Isaiah White.

UNC, the state’s top exporter of pro prospects, once again runs deep with draft talent, even if it won’t produce a first-rounder as it has five times in the last six years. Of the potentially seven Tar Heels who could be signing pro contracts in the coming weeks, Bolt is the most interesting (and mercurial), and there are a few more who show enough promise to justify clogging up the FanGraphs servers with the following words and moving pictures.

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