Blue Jays Sign Noah Syndergaard

Everything you read about most of our early draft picks (with the exception of Sanchez) seems to include phrases like “mid tier starter”, “future in the bullpen” (usually meaning that they don’t have a third pitch), “flat/straight fastball” (dead if they can’t pitch ahead in the count), “AVERAGE” and, in the case of our first/supplemental college guys, “very safe pick” (that’s all that anyone writes about Deck McGuire). So even if these guys do reach their potential I really don’t see any of them being traded for a stud position player. You can’t trade mid-tier pitchers for star position players, you trade them for mid-tier position players. Especially since the league started testing for steroids, which seems to have had a much bigger effect on hitters than pitchers – hence all the near no hitters and guys leading the league in homers with less than 50 long balls a year. I think there is a fundamental shift going on in baseball, that not everyone has caught yet, wherein hitting and skilled position players are going to become a hot commodity and sub-4.00 ERA pitchers are going to be a lot easier to come by.

Therefore I would have preferred if the Jays had used their early picks to go after high ceiling, albeit risky, position players like Costellanos or Yordy Cabrera. Or alternatively, some more high risk but high ceiling high school arms (ie: Tyrell Jenkins, Peter Tago) with the potential to be absolutely dominant starters (as opposed to having mid rotation upside).

I know the Jays had a lot of scouts out there looking at these guys so we should trust their picks, maybe they saw something that no one else did. However, I’m afraid that the fact that we had so many scouts simply decreased the likelihood that we use our early picks to draft high risk guys that may require high bonuses….my logic is as follows: you now had 10 guys (hypothetical high number) looking at these high risk picks, so it meant that in order to draft them you basically needed 10 (as opposed to fewer) scouts to put their reputation on the line on a high risk kid that was going to cost the organization a lot of money if it didn’t work out. Chances are at least one of those 10 guys was going to decide that he doesn’t want to risk his reputation (at a time when a lot of MLB teams are focusing on building from within and draft choices are being scrutinized more than ever before) which will get him to push the team toward a lower risk pick (read: polished college arm). This theory isn’t at odds with the fact that the Jays made riskier choices in the later rounds, since those picks aren’t expected to amount to much anyways, and with the exception of a couple of our choices they’re not going to cost nearly as much (although Thon Jr may end up costing a little extra) as some of the guys that came off the board in the first couple of rounds (noting that we didn’t take a run at a potentially expensive pick like Cecchini, Austin Wilson, or Bryan Ragira)

In the end, I just don’t think we took enough risks and probably won’t end up spending enough money on the draft to accumulate the sort of talent that we need to accumulate in order to compete with the Rays (who made some interesting bets on a couple of guys that a lot of the talent evaluators identified as having all star potential: Sale and O’Conner), or Red Sox/Yankees (who don’t need to take as many risks in the draft because they can buy their all stars on the open market).