Who Will Be the #1 Overall Draft Pick?

he's 18 f&#@ing years old and playing well. what the hell do people want?

 

He should apparently already be a Miguel Cabrera/Adam Everett love child.




Holy s***. Can you imagine how good of a player that would be?

 

i can...his name was Alex Rodriguez like 15-18 years ago.

 

I can see a little worry as it is a long process to MLB. Very few prospects have a very good chance of making MLB from A Ball. Overall number 1 picks generally have a good chance.

 

why are people worried about the astros spending way too much money in the draft whenever the astros have so much money to spend? im confused... dont we have like the lowest paid roster?

 

Theres a limit now on how much we can spend.

 

The less money you spend on the #1 pick can be used for your other draft picks. So if we spend less on #1 we can sign higher rated prospects that fall to our later picks and convince them not to go to college with more money.

 

thank yall for clearing this up.. i am not too entirely familiar with the mlb draft compared to nba and nfl! that makes alot more sense!

 

btw in my opinion it would be a no brainer to go with bryant with the number 1 draft pick! Someone who can hit homeruns like him would be amazing to have on our roster!

 

I guess the short answer would be it's harder to project amateur baseball players as major leaguers than in the other sports. Personally I'm with you-I always get more excited about every day players as prospects as opposed to pitchers.

 

I'm for Bryant as well. Astros lineup could be deadly with him in the mix.

While not really a factor in the MLB draft Astros pitching is far more talented in the minors than most expected before the year. Must be some good coaches on the farm.

 

I went from wanting to draft pitching this whole past year, to jumping on the Kris Bryant bandwagon (it was just too hard to ignore those impressive stats) within the past month, to I think going back to either Gray.

Although our minor league SPs have developed nicely and many are having good seasons thus far, I don't see any true top tier, ace-level pitchers other than McCullers, who has a lot of risk associated with him. That's ok though, I think most of us would take a starting rotation of legit ace plus 4 #2s. I think Gray provides us with that #1, and I think the ceilings of many of our minor leaguers can be a 2/3. Then with selecting another SP (possibly Rodon) with our #1 or #2 pick (hopefully #1) next year, we have a viable 1-2 punch in about 2 years anchoring our big league pitching staff, and then hopefully a bunch of quality arms filling out the 3-5 spots in the rotation.

As tempting as a Bryant/Singleton corner infield is for the next 5 years, my belief is that you simply cannot have enough good arms in the pipeline. I've been going back and forth on it, but I think I am back to pitching with the 1-1.

 

Personally, I'm now in favor of Stewart, but that doesn't seem realistic at this point.

 

You do realize that there are 40 rounds in the MLB draft, right? The Astros will certainly use almost half of those on pitchers.

Scouts appear to have a rougher time projecting pitchers versus position players aka hitters. Thus, drafting a hitter over a pitcher is more of a "can't miss" proposition.

Gray and Appel *at best* have faced low A hitters/competition in their college games. The road for pitchers from low A to MLB can be a very long and hard.

It might more sense to draft multiple HS pitchers in the 2th - 5th rounds. These HS pitchers should face better competition quicker than going the college route.

Take a look at Vincent Velasquez, who the Astros took in the 2nd round of the 2010 MLB draft. Velasquez spent what would have been the summer before what would been his first year in college, playing professional baseball. What would have been his freshman year in college, he was out due to TJ surgery. What would have been his sophomore year, he pitched in the highest level of short season ball. This year, which would have been his junior year, he has already pitched two months in Low A ball, a higher level of competition than either Gray or Appel have faced. Arguably, Velasquez without the TJ surgery would have started the year in AA.

Velasquez may never pitch a single MLB inning but scouts probably have a much clearer picture of his projectability viz-a-viz college pitches like Gray and Appel.

 

I do realize that, but out of those 40 rounds, how many elite arms there? I am also very aware that you can draft well and draft very good players (not just pitchers) late, but at some point the organization should commit to drafting high-ceiling elite pitching prospects early on in the draft, perhaps within their first 2 picks. They could always use the remaining 38 rounds on position players right? The simple fact is, on talent alone, the consensus is that Appel, Gray, and Stewart stand out from among the rest of the pitching pack. Does that mean that you will be able to find quality arms much later in the draft? Absolutely. But why not draft one of those 3 with the first pick and a couple of Roy Oswalts later in the draft too? I'm not understanding why they have to be mutually exclusive.

I think the fans (myself included) and the front office (the previous regime, not necessarily Luhnow and co.) have used the same logic you have, and decided that there are plenty of other rounds to draft pitchers, much to their detriment.

 

If only we had drafted Chris Sale instead of DDJ.

 

Cool Kris Bryant article:

http://bostonherald.com/sports/coll...yants_30_hr_season_with_composite_bat_is_epic

 

Larry Dierker.

 

Is this televised today? Doesn't appear to be on ESPN3.