Giants forced to dig in draft

Late position, format changes make selections challenging

No one will be weeping for the San Francisco Giants on the first day of the major-league draft, July 17. They’re picking last, with the 30th selection.

That’s a good thing. It reflects their 107-win season last year. It’s just not necessarily ideal for Michael Holmes, the Giants’ director of amateur scouting. By the time the team’s pick comes around, the draft board might be covered with names X’d out.

“It’s funny because the coaching staff says, ‘How’s it looking this year?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t really like the look from 30. But if you guys want to win 107 every year, OK,’ ” Holmes said.

With the final pick in the first round, the Giants must cast a bigger net for their No. 1 than teams in the top 10 and the draft has become only more complicated in the past two years, even as it’s dropped from 40 rounds to 20.

Here are some of the wrinkles:

⏩ Moving the draft from early June to mid-July to tie it to the All-Star Game means a major change in scouting schedules — in effect, teams already are starting to scout for next year even as they’re finishing the preparations for this year’s draft. Take the ever-popular wood-bat Cape Cod League for top college players: In past years, all of the participants were eligible for the next year’s draft, but now the league is taking place with half eligible for this year’s draft. Another difficulty: The later draft limits the amount of development for recently drafted players — once signed, it’s tough to get them anywhere to play for any significant length of time.

“It basically cuts out at least like a month, month and a half, of a lot of our coverage that we do for the following draft just because we just don’t have the time to allocate it,” Holmes said. “So what we’ve done is basically taken part of our staff and started them on the ’23 draft already, and we haven’t even drafted ’22 yet. But we have to, or we feel like we’re behind because when we come out of the draft, we jump right back into it. When it comes to the high schoolers, it’s truly a whole new group that a lot of us have not seen.”

⏩ The new MLB combine, which is in its second year, also necessitates a later draft because it includes the top college players. The combine is a good way to get some things done — interviews, and, especially, medical tests — and the Giants sent six representatives to San

Diego for the proceedings. But for teams with extensive scouting operations, it’s a little frustrating: The clubs that cut loose many scouts during and after the pandemic and now are expending fewer resources to prepare for the draft get the same benefit from the combine as do those who devote many resources to their amateur operations.

“That’s always been another issue that I’ve had. I brought this up with the folks in MLB,” Holmes said. “There was this trend, even before COVID, of staff reduction, and I was like, ‘Look, you’re going to have an owner at some point go: ‘Wait a minute. You mean I can send my four best scouts to the combine and they can see all these guys instead of me flying around 18 to 20 guys all year?’ I was like, ‘Hey, I think this is a slippery slope.’

“The Angels furloughed all their scouts that year, and then we had a combine where we just put all the players back in front of them. It’s like: Where’s the advantage to the ownership groups that stood behind their staff, like here in San Francisco? That’s frustrating because I’ve always said, ‘Let me line up my staff and you line up yours and let’s compete and see who does it best.’ ”

There is still an echo from the pandemic, with players eligible for the draft this year almost universally missing the better part of a year of their high school or college careers. Some redshirted an extra year in college, which — in turn — meant fewer opportunities for younger players in those programs, setting off an exodus to junior colleges. It also meant fewer places for incoming college freshmen, which has had a ripple effect.

“I think we’re still a year or two away from normalizing college rosters,” Holmes said. “There’s still slightly less resume.”

Cutting the draft down to 20 rounds doesn’t reward teams with deeper staffs or savvier scouts, who might find absolute gems in the later rounds.

“It’s really hard to unearth guys in 20 rounds,” Holmes said. “That’s always been something that areas scouts have desired: ‘Let me unearth this guy. He’s really athletic. He’s a multi-sport guy.’ ”

Trimming the number of draft rounds and the number of MLB affiliates means that more players wind up in independent leagues, which now take on a more prominent role. The Giants, for instance, scouted nearly all of Kumar Rocker’s outings with the Tri-City ValleyCats because he didn’t sign out of Vanderbilt last year.

And with fewer places to send recent draftees, teams have little leeway on long shots or potential late bloomers — late bloomers are a Giants specialty.

“It’s harder to take multiple guys who might need a longer time frame of development,” Holmes said, citing former Milwaukee and Kansas City outfielder Lorenzo Cain as a good example of a player who started playing baseball at a later age. “It’s harder to make that player fit now, which sucks. That’s something our sport used to be really good at.”

With the shorter draft, the Giants will continue to be aggressive in the amateur free-agent market after picking up some good value there last year, including utilityman Brett Auerbach, who caught the eye of the big-league staff this spring.

There still will be plenty of good players available at No. 30, of course. Rocker might be one, and like last year, the Giants are likely to nab pitching with several of their first few picks. With so many clubs picking ahead of them, though, it’s difficult to guess which names will still be on the board. Last year’s Giants draft class saw them take nine pitchers in the first nine rounds, but it’s the position player taken in the 10th round, outfielder Vaun Brown, who has put together some of the best numbers this season, hitting .349 with 14 home runs. He received a promotion from Low-A San Jose to High-A Eugene on Friday.

“I do think there’s some depth in this year’s draft,” Holmes said. “We really have not changed our approach and how we have evaluated. We’ve really tried hard not to have the attitude of ‘Oh, he’s not getting to us,’ because it’s so hard to predict.

“We’ve really put in the time and effort with everyone, but I think we were able to exhaust our efforts and our energies into a group of guys that we think realistically probably fit where we’re picking. l really feel good about the names that we’re talking about.”