Here’s the pitch...
Draft choices ‘just the way the board landed’, Marlins scout says
Miami Marlins director of amateur scouting D.J. Svihlik didn’t go into the draft expecting to set a franchise first. Svihlik knew the team needed more pitching. And he knew this draft was full of it.
But when the dust settled Thursday night,
Miami had indeed used all six of its selections on pitchers — the first time in Marlins’ history they did not pick a position player in the draft.
“We didn’t plow into this draft thinking, ‘We’re gonna take all pitching,’ ” Svihlik said Friday. “I can give you, maybe at another time, there were very specific position players we like.
Some of them slipped through the cracks. This is just the way the board landed.”
But Svihlik was in no way apologetic. He believes in his class of arms: right-hander Max Meyer out of University of Minnesota; lefthander Daxton Fulton out of Mustang High School in Oklahoma; right-hander Kyle Nicolas from Ball State University; right-hander Zach McCambley out of Coastal Carolina University;
left-hander Jake Eder, a Boynton Beach native who graduated from Calvary Christian and who went to Vanderbilt;
and Kyle Hurt out of Southern California.
The process of deciding which pitchers to take started with a checklist. First, Svihlik explained, they all have either a big build or are highly athletic. Second, they all have fastballs that can reach or exceed the mid-90s, with at least one above-average breaking pitch to complement it. Third, they all met the requisite analytic criteria evaluators set in place “to help you believe their stuff was sustainable,” Svihlik said.
All six selections those requirements.
The other consistency, met aside from Fulton, was the emphasis on taking college pitchers rather than high school pitchers, a product of the abnormal nature of this year.
“The difference is these (college) guys had a chance over the course of three years to define exactly what they were, and there wasn’t a lot of guess work on how they’re going to show up and what they were going to look like when they showed up,” Svihlik said.
The all-pitcher draft comes on the heels of two consecutive drafts in which the franchise did not select a pitcher in the first four rounds. While Miami’s top prospect, Sixto Sanchez, is a pitcher, along with three others in the organization’s top-10 prospects, according to MLB.com, there remains a scarcity of talented arms in the lower levels of the minors.
That undoubtedly played a role in this year’s unorthodox approach.
“From an organizational standpoint, you look at our rosters and whatnot, we’ve got a lot of really good pitching, obviously guys at the top,” Svihlik said. “The opportunity to add another layer of this caliber certainly got me really excited.”
Each player, of course, comes with questions, many of which surrounding whether he can stick as a starting pitcher at the major league level. While there is never certainty about who might eventually become relievers instead, Svihlik offered his philosophical approach when making the projection.
“Certainly, when you look at these arms that we took down the board, and a lot of arms that everybody else took, there’s reliever risk in all of them,” Svihlik said.
“So you’re forced to make a decision as an organization, where are you going to lean? Are you going to lean in to the 89-90 mile an hour strike-throwers, that it’s really easy to say, ‘He’s a fifth-starter in the big leagues.’ Or are you going to take a chance and bet on the player.”