KNBR
If the Giants are planning their Major League Baseball takeover through careful selection of every catcher, hoarding the stockpile so opponents pitchers’ tosses just go to the backstop, maybe it can work.
If sounds as if they won’t be doing the same with hitters, though, and they will allow themselves to expend picks on players who don’t come with a bat.
The Giants opened the 2020 MLB draft with yet another catcher, North Carolina State’s Patrick Bailey, their second first-round catcher in three years (Joey Bart, of course, is the other). In taking Bailey, they also continued a trend toward batters with their top picks; in Farhan Zaidi and amateur scouting director Michael Holmes’ first draft with the Giants, they took a single pitcher (in the eighth round) among their first 10 picks.
The batting focus is both somewhat sensible — hitters are generally more dependable, and the blueprint laid by teams like the Astros involve developing an offense and signing a rotation — and bound to change.
“l would expect us still to take a mix of pitchers and position players at this point,” Zaidi, looking ahead to Day Two, said on a Zoom call Wednesday night.
The Giants entered the draft with just two pitchers (Sean Hjelle and Seth Corry) among their top 10 prospects. Zaidi said they debated arms with the No. 13 pick — notably, Oregon high schooler Mick Abel and Oklahoma’s Cade Cavalli were still on the board — but they were in agreement on Bailey.
“We’re not going to focus on either side, so I would imagine that we have a pretty balanced group of selections [Thursday],” said Zaidi, whose eighth rounder last year was righty Caleb Kilian. “But that wasn’t by design, and there were some pitchers that we talked about today as well. It was just that we had the strongest consensus and overall evaluation on Bailey.”
Such is the nature of the draft that it is just about impossible to pin down which pitchers are on their radar in a pitcher-heavy field. Jared Kelley, a Texas high-school righty, is regarded as the draft’s second-best prep arm (to Abel) and slipped out of the first round. Cole Wilcox, a righty out of the University of Georgia, buzzes into the triple-digits with his fastball.
And then there are the local arms that can break tiebreakers; this regime wants to keep talent at home. Lefty Kyle Harrison, a De La Salle star, should be drafted today, though a team may need to go overslot to keep him from UCLA. Brendan Beck, a righty from Stanford, could join his brother, Tristan, in the Giants organization.
These darts, flung at the dartboard, face heavy crosswinds; who knows. The Giants will have picks 49, 67, 68, 85, 114 and 144 to make decisions that, it sounds like, will not solely be hitters.