MLB teams will handle amateur draft just fine, UBC coach says
UBC Thunderbirds head coach Chris Pritchett has seen a Major League Baseball amateur draft or two from the inside and believes this upcoming draft isn’t quite as tricky as it may seen.
Pritchett was an area scout with the Boston Red Sox from 2010-15, before signing on as bench boss with the T-Birds.
The MLB draft had been slated to take place June 10-12, but various reports have it being pushed back to July and shortened to five rounds from the usual 40. Nothing has been made official yet.
This would normally be a viewing period for scouts, but the collegiate and high school levels shut down five weeks ago. Pritchett says big-league teams would have a feel for those top 150 players, though, going off reports from last season and the handful of games that were played this year.
“Once a draft was over, we’d spend a day to summarize things and then we’d be right onto the next draft,” said Pritchett, who might be best known in these parts for the four seasons he spent manning first base for the then-triple-A Canadians from 1995-98.
“Those top guys for this year have all been seen multiple times. There would be a few reports on all of them. It’s not the way you’d generally like to do it, but they’re also not going to be picking guys out of a hat, either.”
The T-Birds got 20 games into their NAIA season before they were shut down. They had played 52 last year and 55 the year before.
This year’s schedule included a weekend trip in February to Mesa, Ariz., for a four-game set against Benedictine-Mesa. That coincided with an NCAA showdown that weekend in Phoenix between Arizona State and Michigan.
Arizona State features several draft prospects, most notably ballyhooed junior first baseman Spencer Torkelson. Pritchett guessed that “every scouting director” from every MLB team was there for that game.
That was just three games into Arizona State’s season. The power-hitting Torkelson had only 50 at-bats with Arizona State this season, compared with 242 in his sophomore season and 206 as a freshman. Scouts would have seen him those years, and they also would have watched him last summer with the U.S. collegiate national team and two summers ago in the Cape Cod League, the top collegiate all-star loop.
“You’ve seen those high, high picks and you’ve had your scouting director in to see them, too,” Pritchett said.
Pritchett’s job with the T-Birds these days might be more complicated than what his successor with the Bosox is up to now. The NAIA, the second-level American-based collegiate tier behind the NCAA, has opted to give spring-sport seniors the option of coming back for another year of competition because of their seasons being wiped out.
The NCAA has done the same. Pritchett’s roster listed six fourth-year players on its 34-man lineup for the 2020 campaign.
“It sucks for everyone involved, obviously,” Pritchett said about the COVID -19 pandemic. “It sucks for the seniors who lost their season. It sucks for the incoming freshmen, who now might be further down the depth chart if those seniors do in fact come back.
“It’s not like we have something to draw upon with this. It’s not like we can say, ‘Well, we did it this way the last time this happened,’ because nothing like this has ever happened before.”
He can still find some laughs in all of this. The social distancing and isolating has meant that people are home more often than usual, which makes his recruiting easier.
“I’m making phone calls and I’m prepared to leave a message and have my speech ready and then someone will answer,” Pritchett said. “I have to admit that sometimes I’m shocked by it.
“Right now, I can get in a Skype call with a whole family without too much trouble. I’m used to having to leave messages and wait for various calls back.”
Pritchett was a second-round pick in the 1991 amateur draft by the then-California Angels out of UCLA. He would play 13 years in pro ball, highlighted by 61 games over four seasons in the big leagues.
He succeeded Terry McKaig running the T-Birds bench in 2015. McKaig is now the program’s director of baseball.