HollywoodTim

If they go position player, based on the write-ups, I hope for Austin Hendrick. As a SP there are several options. I want ceiling. My over-the-moon draft would be Hendrick and Crochet falling to 47 (no way that is happening). If the Sox should have tried like hell (earlier before transactions were frozen) to get #31 from cheapass Pitsburgh, #35 from Colorado for a bad RP contract, or #36 from cheapass Cleveland who is not afraid to dump salary on is. I really hope in the future they work hard to trade for those Comp Balance picks. We've never even done that yet.

I think if it was the old system and both Sale and Crochet were INTL FAs from Latin America, they would both get really big bonuses because there would be teams not afraid to lose money when gambling on an arm even with injury fears. Look at all the concerns about Tanaka and how much money was thrown at him. But with draft picks teams are more afraid. I think it's fear, not luck, and that if we are lucky, then we are lucky others were afraid. At #13 we would have felt a lot less pressure.

I think he's a great fit for a team like the Cubs or Cardinals, etc. Get a safer bet, someone you can slot into Opening Day 2022 rotation probably or not far from it, someone to fit in the middle of a rotation for a team trying to more like "tread water-contend" vs. "flash dominate" contend as we will be trying to do, e.g. run out a bunch of developed top prospects in pre-arb and arb stage to try to win a title for a few short years before they start getting expensive and you have to scale back to being one of those mid-level "meh"ish playoff teams for a few years. Also maybe a great fit if it's like the Royals with Brady Singer where you have a bunch of picks and you're taking a mix of floor and ceiling, and you're picking up what appears to be BPA after he's already fallen in your lap. I really would hate the pick because it feels ball-less. For the record I wanted Rodon > Guy the Marlins took who busted > lefty who busted > maybe other players > Nola. But I was concerned about Rodon also because of the Boras factor and all the arb and FA issues that could result if he works out as advertised. In general though I think it's more likely that the Crochets of the world become 10+million dollar "difference makers" than the Nola types turn into Nolas. Lance Broadway was kind of that way. Nola had better stuff but Broadway was supposed to be a solid #3/#4 who would come quick due to make up etc.

"Luck"? Did he also fall on Keith Law's draft board due to "luck?"

I think he could be a nice pick in another place in the draft order and under a different set of organizational circumstances. Go ace SP ceiling or star-ceiling position player IMO. I like prototypical high caliber defenders in the OF with enough projection with the bat to move to RF legitimately. Also true CFers who actually have the body type to stick for 6+ years and enough bat to hit 6th or higher in an order. All-around great athletes with great bats work also. This team is going to start resorting to trades to fill holes. If we need a decent starting C or 4th or 5th starter with some upside, we will have the pieces to trade for one. We shouldn't try to draft that guy IMO. Bad strategy IMO.

Rodon: 3+ pitches arguably 2+ and 1++. Detmers: nothing even close to that. Point being, even the guys who look like true #1's sometimes are quite a bit lesser. Put it this way, where do you think a guy like Detmers slots in your playoff rotation? Does he slot in front of Giolito? No. In front of Kopech? No. In front of Cease if Cease figures it out? No. In front of Reynaldo if Reynaldo figures it out? Not for me. Let's say Rodon puts his injuries behind him and signs a short-term extension, however likely or unlikely that may be. Does he then slot in front of Rodon? Not for me. Does he even slot in front of Dallas Keuchel? Right now, expecting Detmers to develop into a better SP than Dallas Keuchel is right now is already enough of an expectation. I'd much rather draft a guy that I think, if he works out, is going to slot in front at least a few of those guys.

I'd take Meyer, Kelly and Bitsko over Detmers even if it isn't Crochet.

Also the great CB pitchers usually seem to be able to throw several different variations of it. The best ones like Zito and Lilly eg from the left side always seem to have a devastating changeup to go with it. Rich Hill, etc. Even though he's a RHP, Brandon McCarthy's CB change combination was another example. I think about John Danks for example. Does he have better stuff all-around or even a better CB than prime John Danks? Danks was a late first rounder. I think overall Danks in his prime is a better pitcher for sure. Again, it's MLB pitching. And I would really be shocked if this CB I'm looking at in gifs is really the best K pitch in the draft. I highly doubt it. Out of all of the eligible players, someone has to have a Bobby Jenks / Kerry Wood yellow hammer or a wicked slider or something, somewhere, and if not right now, it is coming.

Put it this way, he's no Carlos Rodon. And how has Rodon turned out?

Did anyone say it is flat? Also, have you seen Major League pitching before? You can make pitching ninja gifs about like 85-90% of the pitchers in baseball.

I saw some clips on google that makes him look better to me. Maybe he's JA Happ or better yet Ted Lilly if the change is good enough. But I don't see the hype. JMO. He ahs an MLB arm but it's the Major Leagues and pretty much everybody there is a good and has an MLB arm.

Yeah nothing I have seen from Detmers (albeit just a tiny bit) says top-end anything.

Detmers immediately makes me think of Ross Detwiler. Please no.

Is there any reason you don't like Kelley? It sounds like he has big upside and is probably about where Kopech was as high schooler.

If your owner is a cheapskate you should get a competitive balance pick. It's funny how the Tigers get all these competitive balance picks but their owner was drafting players that fell, giving them MLB contracts, and handing out contracts larger than "recommended" bonuses. The Tigers got good players even after the Sox with the Poreda over Porcello thing I mentioned earlier in this thread. This garbage happened a lot. Good for the Tigers and their fans, bad for the Sox fans. I guess there's no Loser's Prize for us.

Also: passing on Rick Porcello and drafting Aaron Poreda because nobody wanted to pay Porcello. Never forget.

It's disappointing to see a Law quote in this thread about draft philosophy still coming from the top. The reinsdorf/williams regime just cannot ever go away. And for all of the crap Law gets here including for his criticism of Sale as a prospect, for the most part I think he's been very correct about our system, and I think he has also proven to have some of the best or most reliable sources about our organization. I remember when it was Phil Rogers just spouting whatever line of bullshit Dave Wilder was feeding him, for a while.

I think Stacey King once said, "If you're scared, buy a dog." If they end up making a safe pick here instead of a high upside risk I'm just going to go ahead and call the guy Lance Broadway regardless of whatever his name is. Then I'll wake up from this trade players for prospects / draft high / sign INTL FAs dream I'm having and realize I'm still a White Sox fan and it's still 2007-2015 or whatever.

It sucks but I'm not sure how much good it does as an organization to hold onto players like this when you (a) aren't going to play them this year, (b) aren't going to pay them much of anything, if anything at all, this year, and (c) if you are looking at best case scenario forcing them to compete in the next ST for bench and pen spots in the low minors against perhaps a great number of UDFAs, and especially all the while knowing that the next 2-3 drafts are going to end up being more talent-rich on the front end as a side effect of pushing everybody back for a year. The 2021 draft crop would be threatening their job slots immediately unless they took huge strides forward, and how likely is that? I hope a side effect of all of this is that international baseball gets a lot stronger. I guarantee I hate owners more than anyone else here ever does, but for most of these guys, telling them to move on probably helps them more than hurts them at the moment. They were on shaky grounds anyway and at least now maybe some of them will move on to other roles that serve their lives better.

In the draft you pay for the raw talent / stuff / ability / tools at the time, along with how advanced they are or are not at the time, and then you have things like projected fit and signability and bonus amounts that play into it. I guess my position is that paying for the "advanced" part is fine with a high pick, but I don't want to pay the "advanced" price if there is not some serious ceiling attached also. We can get lesser combinations of ability + advancement later on in the draft, and some of those combinations turn out very well. Hansen was obviously more ability than advancement, and that also worked out for a while. He would have been pretty good trade bait for a period of time, probably not for a great player but I bet there was a point we could have gotten an excellent controllable reliever for him or a fringey MLB position player for sure. Those kinds of players are also available later on. Re: Dick Allen's post above about retrospecting Buehrle, he is correct, but the point is that even if you could do that year's draft over again, with you having full hindsight whereas no one else had any idea what was going to happen, you would rework your draft still to take Buehrle way later, because you would know he'd be available in the 38th round or whatever it was, and you still would take players with more "talent" who rose in prospect ranks and then totally busted over him, but the caveat is you'd trade them rather than keep them. The point is that if you are a good organization from a scouting and player development perspective, you shouldn't really be afraid of missing on a talent like Detmers. But if say a player like Crochet works out as a starter, everyone who passed on him is going to look like an idiot. And if you take him and he gets hurt, oh well, but you really can't say that you weren't "trying" when you took him.

^I actually think SP prices are coming down. Not on the top guys but on the mid-rotation types and back-end types, compared to maybe 8 or 10 years ago or so.

I disagree wholeheartedly. If you're talking about Wheeler, they are paying him to be a top end SP, and "dealing with it" if he is lesser. They are paying for top-end stuff and hoping achievement or overachievement, not paying for mid-rotation stuff and hoping for overahievement. **I will say that I actually think of Wheeler as mid-rotation in terms of what he's likely to do on the field, but again, he's a special case due to the arm. If he's healthy and on, in the playoffs, he can match up with anyone.

I thought about Aaron Nola. But then at the same time, like everyone else, we waaaaaaaay missed on Jacob DeGrom. He is another one that could have been had by anyone. 9th round 272 overall.

^Actually I think Hector was a 5th rounder or something. But McCarthy was a late pick, Hudson was a later round pick, even Gio Gonzalez was a supplemental pick.

I agree but we got Quintana as a MiLB FA. Buehrle was today's equivalent of an UDFA, IIRC so was Hector Santiago. Clayton Richard was a very unheralded prospect, same thing with Chris Bassitt (RHP) and so on. The Sox are pretty good at finding mid-to-back of the rotation types. Garland for Karcher is the kind of deal that theoretically can happen again. At #11 we should take the opportunity to grab a kind of talent that otherwise wouldn't be available to us unless we are putting 100+ million or a trade of an excellent player on the table. No matter where we are picking, we should be able to find talents like those players mentioned above. I have personally thought before, for a long time actually, that the strength of this rebuild could be our RP. Bummer could potentially get us a real nice SP prospect in A ball or something right now. We have a lot of potential setup types that, if enough of them turn out, will be quality trade bait that is under control for a long period of time. Maybe we go around targeting other teams' versions of Thompson and Dalquist, etc. I think that is an approach that should be followed.