The Astros have more than their share of highly talented young players, but one player they don’t have in their system is Cubs masher Kris Bryant. Houston had the chance to take Bryant with the first pick in the 2013 draft, but they decided on righty Mark Appel instead, and the Cubs snagged Bryant with the next selection. Appel, now 25, has yet to make his big-league debut, and was traded to the Phillies in the Ken Giles deal last offseason. Bryant, meanwhile, leads the NL in home runs, runs scored and OPS+ while anchoring an intimidating Cubs lineup.
The Cubs and Astros are currently playing a series, so Astros GM Jeff Luhnow fielded questions about the Bryant-Appel decision. Here’s some of what he had to say, courtesy of Gordon Wittenmyer of the Chicago Sun-Times.
“There’s a history lesson to be learned about the risk with pitchers vs. position players,” says Luhnow, referring to the tendency of position players to be better bets in the early stages of the draft. “[T]hat’s a history lesson that’s been laid out over a long period of time. Having said that, if you want an impact pitcher, you have to gamble.”
The Astros have had plenty of experience selecting both position players and pitchers with top picks in recent years. Of their ten first-round picks from 2011 to 2016, six were position players, and three of those (George Springer, Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman) clearly look to be significant parts of their future. Another, outfielder Derek Fisher, was a later selection who doesn’t look like an impact player, but who has consistently hit well in the minors. The others, Kyle Tucker and Daz Cameron, were drafted last year and are still teenagers. Cameron has struggled so far in his pro career, but Tucker’s is off to a fast start, as he’s already advanced all the way to Class A+ Lancaster.
Meanwhile, two of four pitchers the Astros have selected in the first round, Appel and Brady Aiken, have suffered significant speed bumps even though they were both first overall picks, and the Astros famously didn’t even sign Aiken due to a disagreement regarding the Astros’ concerns about his health. One of their other first-round pitching picks was this year’s 17th overall selection, Forrest Whitley, about whom it’s way too early to pass judgment. Even granting the Astros’ success with 2012 supplemental pick Lance McCullers, their experience does seem to bear out the maxim that there are considerable risks to selecting pitchers at the top of the draft.
Nonetheless, Luhnow says the Appel/Bryant decision doesn’t keep him up nights. “We’ve got Carlos Correa. We’ve got Alex Bregman. We’ve got Lance McCullers. Our scouting department has done a nice job with the draft,” he says. “You can always look back and say I should have taken this player instead of that player, but there’s no reason to really dwell on it.”
can’t figure out why you would ever take a pitcher over a position player with top pick. pitchers play like 30 games a year and at best get you 20 wins. position players play like 140 games and should get you a couple more then that. pitcher are way more injury-prone. maybe it just me but i think I would alway take the position player with top pick.
What people are conveniently forgetting is that the debate in 2013 was not over Appel vs. Bryant. The debate was over Appel vs. Jon Gray with Kris Bryant being considered a long shot at best to go #1. Mock drafts almost always had Kris Bryant going 3rd. I remember that distinctly because the Rockies were picking third and I was hoping that one of the two pitchers somehow fell to them at 3. I was thrilled when the Cubs took Bryant. I honestly still am happy about it because Bryant would no doubt be called “just a product of Coors Field” if the Rockies had drafted him.
This article could just as well be about the Nationals taking Trout over Strasburg in 2009. No one questioned that at the time, but in hindsight it looks like what they should have done. No one even considered Trout that high. Check out some old articles about that draft. His comparison with a “current” MLBer was almost universally Aaron Rowand. The draft is just pure luck and no one will ever convince me otherwise..
My thoughts exactly. Nobody can predict the future. Had Kris Bryant been a washout or just average, this article wouldn’t even exist. The draft is pure luck because there’s so many moving parts that make a player a success. Everything from the hitting/pitching coaches to their teammates and clubhouse atmosphere. Plus injuries are almost always unforeseeable. There is never a sure-fire pick in the draft. Plain and simple.
Exactly Ray………..”Mike Trout was taken with the 25th pick in the 2009 draft.”…………21 teams selected other players.before him. Do you think those GM’s lose sleep over that? I doubt it, because Ray is correct…………..No one had any inclination that Trout would be “as good as he is”. The Astros have done a great job of performing a complete rebuild. They’ve chosen several “home runs” with their picks. That’s a winner right there!
Ray is right….it IS pure luck. There have been very few “sure bets” like ARod, Harper or Junior. Josh Hamilton was thought of as a future great and he eventually proved he WAS exceptional. But Tampa sure didn’t get use out of Josh for obvious reasons. But that’s the risk of giving players big money. You don’t know how they will handle it and will they work hard after getting it. In the case of Colorado, they never seem to run short of good/great hitters. Scoring runs has never been a problem. Yes, a lot of their offensive stats are aided by Coors but that’s besides the point. Denver MUST keep taking pitchers because their record of developing good arms has been dismal. Hampton, Kile & Nagle didn’t work. And the Rocks had to overpay to get those guys because pitchers and their agents know what a chamber of horrors it has been for Colorado pitchers.
Ray Ray you just made me think of something. If you’re the Rockies. You HAVE to pick pitching because few tier one FA pitchers will sign with them (unless you overpay badly). Same with SF. A lot of hitters don’t want to play there but pitchers do. I always said about the Sandoval thing… A big part of his thinking had to (or should have been) playing games as a hitter at ATT vs Fenway. His numbers should have been inflated at Fenway (plus playing a lot of games in Toronto, NY and Camden). The media rarely says “this guy is a 20 home run a year guy but he plays in a hitter friendly park”. They just quote the numbers because nobody cares how the sausage is made! If Brandon Belt played for Boston he would be a 30 HR a year guy and people would be throwing rose petals as he got off the bus.
Deke, I think you’re wrong. For years, people/media diminished Mel Ott’s career because he was a great pull hitter in the Polo Grounds, a place where the right field foul pole was only 257 feet.. Ott hit 135 more HR’s in NY than on the road. Look at all the criticism heaved at Denver hitters. Todd Helton had some incredible stats but if you look closely, Helton hit 60 points higher, had 85 more HR’s and 300+ rbi’s at home than on the road. Those are significantly different numbers. Larry Walker is another….he hit .383 with a at Coors and has a lifetime 315 average. Take away Coors, and Walker is a less than a 280 hitter. Slugging percentages are similar. There are several other examples of this which is why the media dismisses the hitting stats of Colorado hitters and why Helton/Walker and others will have a difficult time getting in the Hall of Fame in spite of some great numbers. Writers speculated for years in the debate “DiMaggio vs Williams” about what would have happened if Ted had played in the Bronx and Joe would have played at Fenway, which had the relatively short distance to the “Green Monster” and a deep right field while the Yanks had the very deep fence in left and especially left center and the short right field porch. DiMaggio did hit .344 in Boston and had a slugging percentage of nearly 60 points higher than at home. Williams on the other than hit 50 points higher vs NYY and had a slugging % nearly 100 points higher at Fenway. Granted, Ted had to face Yankee pitching which was generally much better than the Red Sox. But Williams had a career 345 record vs NYY and his lifetime average was .344. The Clipper was about ten points higher vs Boston than his lifetime average of 325. Joe was a MUCH better hitter on the road than at home.
I would agree that the draft absolutely takes some luck, but I’m not willing to say that it’s 100% luck based. I think there is an amount of credit that goes to a team’s scouting and development teams.
I agree. Also teams look at a player and say “he has a hole in his swing but he has power and we think we can fix that”. They do that for the draft, for trades and for FAs. So much goes into what a team thinks they can do with a player based on scouting.
Before condemning the Astros over the missed opportunity, lest we forget that the draft that year was all about Mark Appell and Jon Gray. Kris Bryant was a fly by night who showed up out of nowhere and started mashing. In fact a lot of people were kind of shocked when the Cubs picked Bryant over Gray when Appell was off the table. Also, Gray had been suspended for use of a PED, which ended up being something like Adderall a few weeks before the draft, and if not for that, consensus is that the Cubs would have picked Gray, and even then, there was no guarantee that Bryant would have been picked next.
As a Cubs fan, I’m beyond thrilled that it went down the way it did. But the talk of Bryant being the Strasburg or Harper of that draft is completely false.
To be fair there were questions about Bryant’s swing and miss in college and his ability to stick at 3b
Maybe some. But I know that the Rockies, who were drafting 3rd, were literally begging the Cubs to go somewhere else they wanted Bryant so bad. And they’ve got Arenado at 3rd. IIRC, so did the teams drafting 4th and 5th.
Interesting article. Such errors in judgement haunt me for months when playing fantasy baseball. Operating under a similar poor choice in reality would be altogether difficult to manage, the matter would consume my thinking day and night.
First person to mention fantasy. Totally fair comparison.
Baseball is a game of failure. I think GMs just know it and move on. They have the coolest jobs in the word. Why live in regret?
Obviously Appel was a bust, but Lance McCullers (when healthy) is everything we wanted. The pick didn’t work out, but so what?
I’m a Cubs fan, so obviously i like the way things played out
however i think it was an entirely defensible choice by the Astros given what both players were seen as at the time
Appel was considered a very advanced, very successful college pitcher with little injury concerns and few, if any, ‘red flags’ when it came to his delivery.
Bryant on the other hand was considered more or less all bat with major question marks about his ability to play defense at 3b, with a good number of teams reportedly more interested in him as an OF. He also had huge k numbers in college, which inevitably lead to questions about how viable his power would really be in game situations
Appel is obviously a disappointment so far, and Bryant has somehow managed to exceed the expectations most scouts had at draft time… but i don’t think it’s fair to judge the Astros with that much hindsight.
I would love to hear Kenny Williams take …… He likes to take 8 tool players that are good at Football and Soccer then Hit 200 in AA with over 200ks
They had 3 1/1 picks and only got one right, Bobby heck got it right then was fired hmmmmm
Hard to consider the Brady Aiken pick to be an ultimate failure. It didn’t look good at the time, no doubt, but they got Alex Bregman a year later as compensation, and he sure looks fantastic