Draft Recap (Hoppy Endings, pre Sim 8) [PP:2057.12]

[neugey]

With the war room nearly empty except for pizza boxes and soda cans, Edmonton GM Mike Bauer spent a few moments with the media to discuss the outcome of the 2057 edition of the BBA amateur draft.

“This was a unique draft, a different market of players than you’ll usually see. There was some nice high-end talent all throughout the first round. We were very fortunate the top pitcher fell to us at #7, Pepe Rivera. Truth be told, we do emphasize pitching a little more than hitting in these drafts overall. The assortment of hitters available on the free agent market is significant, and usually a bit cheaper than the asking prices for quality pitching. I don’t know that this will always be the case, but that’s the current environment and putting a premium on developing our own pitching is cost effective.”

“This draft was very unusual in that there were a lot of older non-traditional college players in the 23-25 age range that were draft eligible and of reasonable quality. For that reason, we decided to mostly eschew the high school prospects and address the organizational depth of our farm system with the 18+ year old players, many of them on the 20+ side. A lot of these guys will be important role players on the minor league level with a slim chance of making the majors. And that is okay, because we need to surround our top prospects with reasonably skilled teammates. We believe that having solid help along with those prospects has a residual effect that helps their development, along with the minor league winning.”

“One player we’re quite excited about is catcher Jose Aguilar from the 4th round. He’s a great left-handed hitter, and is more of an offensive backstop than a defensive one, but it’s quite hard to find good contact hitting at that position so he’ll prove to be important in the years to come. We actually considered drafting him in the 3rd round, but instead selected CL Cesar Alfaro. It’s extremely rare to find a reliever so well developed with such a high floor and we couldn’t afford missing out on him.”

“So in summary the augmentation of our pitching core with Rivera, Alfaro and other hurlers we took in rounds 6-12 will be what we remember this draft for. Also we are hoping our 2nd round selection 2B Manuel Ortega will be able to come up to the majors in a few years and succeed Scott Bell. We’ll see how that shakes out. But all in all we are very excited for this young core to get things off to a great start with the Toppers (Short A) and the Credits (Rookie ball).”

[JimSlade]

Rivera was my second-favorite of the pitchers who got taken before I could pick, and Aguilar was coming up on my board before you beat me to him! I spent a lot of time looking at Alfaro, too, so much so that I was in jeopardy of stalking charges.