The Draft And What The Red Sox Should Do With The Fourth Pick

The major league draft starts on Sunday and the Red Sox are picking fourth. The last time they picked this high was the Lyndon Johnson administration, so it’s been a bit. The draft as always is not unlike a game of chance. There are ways to increase your odds of success, but those ways are often hard to discern, ever changing, and even if you do tilt the numbers your way slightly, you still might draft Kolbrin Vitek.

Like all drafts, there’s a draft industrial complex that’s grown up around it. Draft experts who know instantly whether a team has made a good or bad pick, whether a team has over-drafted or under-drafted a kid, who can do what and all the rest of it. It’s not all garbage, certainly, and indeed I happen to find much of it quite interesting, but the key to remember through all the noise is this: nobody really knows anything.

Last year the Red Sox had the 17th pick in the draft and picked Nick Yorke which would’ve been fine if anyone had ever heard of him before. People, including yours truly, freaked the heck out. A year later Yorke is putting up almost an .800 OPS in A ball while being 2.4 years young for the level. So yeah. Nobody really knows anything. [waves]

I will now tell you things and present an opinion about those things which, it should be mutually understood, nobody and that most certainly includes me, really knows anything about. Clear? Excellent.

The Red Sox do have a bit of a unique-to-them opportunity in this draft to pick the kind of talent that is typically only available to them on the international free agent market, the regular free agent market, or by trade. In other words, everywhere except the draft. The pick they make will impact the organization for good or bad for decades, though that’s a dramatic way of saying something that applies to every draft pick. What if the Red Sox had taken Christian Yelich instead of the aforementioned Vitek? The team looks different now! What if they hadn’t taken Betts in the fifth round back in 2011? The team looks different now! These things are all, for good or bad, ripples in the pond.

Unlike some drafts with premium blue-chip gold-standard players at the top - your Bryce Harper, your Stephen Strasburg - this draft is more of a potpourri of good talent, at least at the very top. Whereas everyone knew Harper was going to be at least a good major league player, there isn’t anyone like that available this Sunday. That doesn’t mean there won’t be some guys who have excellent careers, just that we don’t know who they are yet.

There are, broadly speaking, three major categories of player the Sox could take with the fourth pick: a college starting pitcher, a high school shortstop, or a college catcher. I mean, the Red Sox could select a bar of soap if they wanted to, but the pick they make at four will not be a bar of soap and will be, according to every available source, someone from those three groups.

The first group is two guys but really it’s just one guy. This group is composed of Vanderbilt University starters Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker, but according to just about every source, Leiter is the guy Boston wants, while Rocker is likely to fall further down the draft into the tens or so of the first round. I’m no scout so don’t take scouting reports from me, but Leiter has had a phenomenal sophomore season with Vanderbilt. He possesses a mid-90s fastball, multiple above average off-speed pitches, in this case a slider and changeup, and his makeup is supposedly excellent (i.e. he’s a good hard-working dude).

He’s also a pitcher and in an already risky exercise, pitchers represent an especially risky sub-group. Pitchers are tossing another bullet in the cylinder of your Russian roulette pistol. Of course all major league teams need pitchers and college pitchers are older and easier to project than high school guys, so among this already extremely risky positional group, college pitchers are the safer route to go.

For whatever it’s worth, Leiter would be an exciting addition to the Red Sox system. He projects as somewhere between an ace and a mid-rotation starter in the majors and has no injury concerns beyond the fact that he pitches for a living. He would be an expensive signing but there’s every likelihood (as far as these things go) that he would sign and be worth the money.

Rocker is bigger, stronger, and has been more inconsistent. He’s been projected to fall well past the Red Sox into the mid-first round, but there have been rumors of the Sox’ interest in him, enough that I feel compelled to mention him here. It’s possible, if Leiter is gone or if Rocker agrees to take less money from the Red Sox (thus freeing up precious bonus pool room to be used on other high upside players later in the draft) the Sox could pounce. It would be an intriguing pick, though not one I’d make.

The second group is high school shortstops and this is where things get interesting in this draft. High school players are generally higher ceiling and lower floor types. They haven’t played as much in the spotlight and perhaps more importantly haven’t grown and matured nearly as much as college players. This adds an element of physical uncertainty to their already uncertain growth as baseball players which must be accounted for. This is the group that is the most exciting and has the most chance to turn into a superstar and the most chance to become nothing at all.

This group can be broken up into two sub-groups: Marcelo Mayer from California and Jordan Lawlar from Texas comprise the first and most highly thought of group among the draft chatting classes, while Brady House from Georgia and Kahlil Watson from North Carolina make up the second. Mayer is thought to be the most polished player, with better bat-to-ball skills and defensive ability. Lawlar is thought to have better power potential and a higher overall upside. House has greater power but scouts aren’t sure he can stay at shortstop in the majors. He’s also struggled at times with strikeouts. Watson is fast and has intriguing bat speed, but he’s not very big and the power potential is questionable.

The third group is college bat, which is to say a guy who has hit really well in college who scouts believe will be able to hit in the pros. This group is comprised of: 1) Henry Davis.

That’s it.

Davis offers a powerful bat, the ability to hit for some average and to control the strike zone. He’s also a catcher and some teams think he can remain behind the plate to show off his plus arm, even though he possesses below average catching skills otherwise.

So that’s basically it. The Red Sox could pull a wild card and re-draft Nick Yorke (hey, it worked once!) but the likelihood is somewhere above I just named the guy the Red Sox will pick fourth overall.

So that’s all the background. Now we get to the informed, or as informed as I can be sitting in my pajamas on my couch and reading things online, section. Davis scares me. His bat is supposed to be for real, but he may not be able to stay behind the plate and if that’s so then a lot of his value has dried up. He is supposed to have plus makeup (scout speak for a good work ethic and attitude) but lots of guys have that and never make the majors. I don’t see him as a huge impact player in the organization, though, again, please kindly keep in mind I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s not the person that scares me, it’s the profile. I love the idea of a power hitting catcher, a franchise cornerstone behind the dish for the next decade, but I fear the reality might be closer to part time DH, mediocre left fielder who posts league average numbers at the plate.

With that in mind, what I’m about to write is not going to make much sense, but hey, it’s the MLB draft so it kinda doesn’t have to! I really like the high school shortstops. It seems next to impossible that Mayer will get to the Red Sox at four, but if he does the Red Sox would be insane not to snatch him up. Five tool shortstops don’t grown on trees and though he comes with a lot of risk just because of the high school thing, he comes with less risk than most of his cohort. But he’s extremely likely to be off the board at four and if that proves to be the case, I hope the Red Sox take Lawlar. His is probably the widest range of possible outcomes, from perennial All Star to never gets past Double-A, but it’s that first outcome that I’d like to focus on. He is big, strong, and should develop legit power, but fast and quick-twitch enough to remain at shortstop and likely play the position at an above average level in the majors. Sign me the heck up! That’s exactly the kind of profile the Red Sox should be targeting with this, the rarest (for them) of picks.

Watson is an enticing option as well though it seems the consensus is he’ll be picked later in the first round. Still, I’d be down with a Watson pick. Athleticism, plus defense at short, and great bat speed? Twist my arm.

The guy that I think the Red Sox end up with though is Leiter. The Rangers at two are apparently big on Leiter as well, so he could go there, and former Red Sox GM Ben Cherington is now running the Pirates who have the first overall pick, so perhaps he sees a future ace there and wants to go with the quicker developing player rather than a high school kid who could take four, five, or six years to get to the majors. Those are possibilities, but for a variety of reasons, I don’t think the Pirates (click over to Pirates Outsider for more on this) take Leiter and with the Tigers reportedly enamored with high school pitching and other high school shortstops like House, it seems if Leiter can slip by the Rangers, he’ll fall right into Boston’s lap.

If Leiter does go early though, I’m hoping the Red Sox pick either Lawler or Watson. The fourth overall pick is a chance to get some really high upside talent and I don’t see Davis as that guy. If he becomes a slightly below average defensive catcher with a .900 OPS and a cannon for an arm, that would be fantastic and if the Red Sox select him, clearly that’s what they’re hoping for. And, I can’t stress this enough, they know much more about it than I do (which doesn’t mean they might not be wrong because, remember, nobody really knows anything).

One other advantage picking fourth overall provides is a larger bonus pool and thus more money to spend later in the draft. The Red Sox have more than $11 million they’re allowed to spend on draft picks, which is the sixth highest amount of any team (information from the always excellent Sox Prospects). This means the Sox can draft high upside players later in the draft and pay them enough money to get them to forgo their college commitments and sign with Boston. Picking Davis over Leiter or Lawler would be a way to do that, at least on a slightly smaller scale.

Alternatively, they could re-run the play they made last season and attempt to draft someone who would sign for way under the slot value of the fourth pick. This would save millions of dollars the team could reallocate to other picks. In other words, pick Leiter and then slot value guys later on, or pick Davis and overpay for some exciting talents later on. I’m presenting it as a binary choice, though it’s probably more of a gray area. Still, generally speaking it’s a consideration.

The final point is that of all the guys picked, the one who has the largest chance to make an impact in the major leagues is the guy the Red Sox pick fourth. While the other picks are very important, the fourth is the most important. To me, there’s no reason to play games and move money around here. There are potentially franchise changing talents on the board. Don’t fool around. Grab the best one available and worry about buying some high school pitcher out of his BC commitment later.

This draft holds special significance for the Red Sox and will impact them for a long time, or, alternatively, not at all. It’s not do-or-die, but there’s a good amount riding on it.

If you want to read more on this, I suggest the Sox Prospects draft preview, and all their coverage at that site. Also, read the various mock drafts of which there are too many to list, though the ones by Jonathan Mayo and Jim Callis at MLB Pipeline (MLB.com’s draft and prospect site) are free as is the draft coverage at FanGraphs. I’ll have more here after the draft.