Now we’re talking about some guys who are going to sound familiar. Yes, we had a couple in the last half-decade. I mean, who can discount Bo Jordan and Mingo Boone? But those guys are legends because of their long careers. At 2016, we’re only 16 years ago, and a guy drafted at 18 would only be 34—still possibly viable. So, yeah, we’re getting into the meat and potatoes of some current day players.Assuming, that is, the Yellow Springs Nine front office was doing their job.
Let’s go see how they did.
2016: Benjamin Franklin 'Hawkeye' Pierce, CFPlayer Page
The Nine’s reward for horrific performance was to be able to draft #1 overall. They picked up Hawkeye, who turned into one of the league’s premier center fielders. He broke in with the Nine at age 22, showed promise that first year, and then proceeded to crank up the value each of the next four seasons until he dropped a 9.4 WAR beast on the league in 2019—whereupon he was traded to Vancouver.
Interestingly, though I’m not trying to include trade value in this conversation, that deal brought the Nine Carlos Medina and Jose Chavez, two building blocks that the team used to leverage itself to the position it’s in now.
Bottom line: at his peak, Pierce was a HoF quality guy—a dangerous hitter, and perhaps the most gorgeous center fielder the league has known (+24 ZR in 2019, several similar scores in other years centered on that peak). Even in Vancouver, he was above average. At 37, he’s still playing in Jacksonville, still hitting the ball a bit, but watching him field is painful.
Draft Assessment: Pierce is a Hall of Good player. Solid pick.
Value Achieved for YS9: Good
2017: Jesús Guzmán, LHPPlayer Page
Guzman was drafted out of high school as a guy with a fastball, a splitter, and a change up. He used all three of these pitches far too often as he bumped around the minor league systems of a couple different teams over the next six years.
“He wasn’t the brightest planet in the system, if you know what I mean,” one ex-coach said of him. “And he preferred sitting in the bleachers and quaffing beer to going out and getting into shape.”
At age 24, Guzman was out of baseball and was last known to be teaching high school PE.
Draft Assessment: Bust
Value Achieved for YS9: None
2018: Sage Kotsenburg, 3BPlayer Page
Back to its old habits, the Nine drafted Kotsenburg, and immediately traded him. It turns out this was probably the best thing to do with him, though, so sometimes Karma comes around, eh? He wound up playing parts of two seasons in the Mountie organization, where he accumulated 172 big league at bats before disappearing, one assumes into the rocky hills of Utah, where he came from.
All you can really say for him was that he was smallish for a third baseman, but had the arm and he had the grit of one of those free ranger mountain men. Liked to hunt and shoot, which he spent most of his money doing.
Draft Assessment: Bust
Value Achieved for YS9: None
2019: José Martínez, 2BPlayer Page
By 2019, the team is picking down in the 23 slot, and at the end of the day you have to say Martinez was a hit. He appeared with the big club at age 21, and grew into a fine glove man who could hit a bit. Yellow Springs traded him to Hawaii in the middle of his second year, where he made the bulk of his career…a career that’s seen him win a Landis and a Diamond glove, and seen him create about 21 WAR.
Bottom line, Martinez is the definition of “solid major leaguer.” People forget that he’s only 30, also. Yes, he crashed hard last year in Madison, but he could help some teams out.
At that’s what he thinks as he sits on his family’s front porch in Puerto Rico, waiting for the phone to ring.
Draft Assessment: Good pick
Value Achieved for YS9: Some
2020: Lodewijk Kluin, RHPPlayer Page
The Dutch Crutch had a tough birthing into the league, drafted at various time by Atlantic City, Calgary, and Halifax without signing before agreeing to take a half million dollars from Yellow Springs. And, why not? Kluin doesn’t throw hard, but he’s got three nice pitches and uses them to keep the ball in the park. Unfortunately at this time, those parks have mostly belonged to minor league teams. He pitched 15 games with Yellow Springs in 2026, and was plucked out of the YS9 organization in the rule 5 draft, throwing 63 innings in 31 games for the Bandits before being released.
He’s currently with the Calgary organization.
At 31, he could still see some clock.
Draft Assessment: Let’s call it a bust, though he’s still interesting.
Value Achieved for YS9: None
Overall assessment:
On the field, the span of 2016-2020 was a mini-apex for the team. Yellow Springs won their division three times in those five seasons, failing in the playoffs each year. Perhaps this is a microcosm for the whole organization: good, but not good enough. And that microcosm played out on the draft board, too. It was a mixed bag. Pierce was the gem of the collection. Martinez was a good player, but Guzman and Kotsenburg were failures of Hindenburg proportion, and Kluin seems to have been fools’ gold. You’ll note, too, that the yield of one solid player from the first round in the last four draft seasons might tell you something about what’s going to happen to the club’s on-field performance in the next five.
But that is a story for another day.