Five takeaways from the Orioles’ draft.
Picking second overall in this week’s MLB draft, the Orioles had their chance to make an early mark on the draft and took it.
Their selection of Arkansas outfielder Heston Kjerstad turned expectations for how the top of the first round would play out, and cast their efforts in the shortened five-round draft not as a way to amass the best talent available but as a way to game the draft financially.
Whether that’s actually the case is hard to tell until they disperse their nearly $14 million in the bonus pool, though the perception alone hurt the players they ended up taking and likely shaded the whole draft.
But it’s still so early in the regime of executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias and company that every major event like this is an opportunity to learn tendencies and try to glean their intentions, and this draft is no different. Here are five things we learned after the 2020 Orioles draft.
1. This is a weird way for the honeymoon period to wind down.
The Orioles bucking the public consensus among mock drafts and analysts that had them taking a higher-rated player like Vanderbilt’s Austin Martin instead of Kjerstad at No. 2 overall has a segment of the fan base that was already looking for a reason to not like what the new front office is doing to turn on it.
Perhaps because there’s no baseball, fans have had time to do months of research, and they had real reasons to distinguish Martin and the rest from Kjerstad. More likely, some fans’ expectations grew that there was one correct pick and anything else was wrong.
The Orioles kept their interest in Kjerstad quiet. If they were connected at all to him in the weeks leading up to the draft, and this truly wasn’t an excuse to save money or begin gaming the signing-bonus slot system, maybe fans would have viewed him as a suitable alternative the way they did Asa Lacy, Nick Gonzales or Zac Veen.
(This falls on reporters as well; Kjerstad wasn’t mentioned until the day of the draft, and only then in passing.)
Instead, fans did not find out that this player, few were familiar with leading up to the draft, was actually a fast-riser with a great power-hitting background and a swing made for Camden Yards.
The same methodology that went into the Orioles’ 2019 draft, which was widely well-regarded, as well as all those “Astroball” drafts, contributed to the six players who topped the Orioles’ draft board when their picks came up this year.
This was what they were hired for, and without any evidence that they’d fumbled that duty since joining the Orioles to back it up, it seems like that shine has worn off.
2. Their draft model really favored data and projections from the 2020 season.
Veteran trend-spotters noted that the Orioles went heavy on college bats at the expense of all of them, but in all cases, it seems like there was a lot of weight on both what they did in the shortened college season in 2020 and what they did last summer — the two most recent sets of scouting looks and data available to them.
“We have a really good analytics team,” Elias said Wednesday. “Sig Mejdal and particularly Michael Weis, who is our draft data analyst, and we tried to do it as scientifically as we could. Simulate the rest of their seasons, and I’m sure other clubs attempted the same thing, and that was a portion of our process this year with every player.”
Kjerstad was having an outstanding first month of his college season, with him and 30th overall pick Jordan Westburg building on standout summers with Team USA and in the Cape Cod Baseball League. Westburg was the Most Valuable Player in that league in 2019, and was having his best season yet at Mississippi State.
There was less track record with draft-eligible sophomore Hudson Haskin, but he was en route to replicating an impressive freshman year at Tulane and hit well in the New England Collegiate League last summer. Third-round pick Anthony Servideo didn’t have much success on the Cape last year, but his .390 average, .575 on-base percentage and .695 slugging percentage, with five home runs, represented a massive step forward in his shortened junior season at Mississippi.
It goes beyond the actual statistics, as there’s valuable exitvelocity data and countless other metrics to come from even a small sample of games. It’s almost as if the Orioles’ board was made up to rank as if the season went on without interruption.
“They were weighed pretty heavily, just because the fact that this is not your typical spring, so we essentially had to supplement the looks that we had on these guys from four weeks of the college season with data points,” domestic scouting operations supervisor Brad Ciolek said.
“But also, what’s most important is every single one of these guys that we selected, there was a balance between scouting and analytics. It wasn’t just one or the other. We ... put these guys in order based upon the whole body of work and weighing both sides of the equation.”
3. They might not spend their whole bonus pool, and that could be hard to explain.
Without taking a player who would command an outsized signing bonus out of their six picks, from Kjerstad through the rest of the selections, it’s hard to envision how the Orioles will manage to spend the nearly $14 million allotted to them for their six picks.
When Elias took over in 2018 and had inherited a large portion of the team’s $8.25 million in international signing bonus-pool money from that year, with several million of that coming from trades that helped dismantle the major league team, there was an expectation that all that money would be spent as the international operation ramped up.
Most of it was spent or traded, but some wasn’t, and he made clear that just having it available to spend didn’t mean they would. The draft is a completely different animal, though.
And for an organization that’s slashed major league payroll to the bone, owns its own television network and is in the midst of a homegrown rebuild, leaving the ability to spend money to enhance that on the table because of how their board fell might ring hollow for plenty of frustrated fans.
4. They really need these hitters in the system, even if it wasn’t drafting for need.
Imagine a world where the 2020 season happened as planned for the Orioles: Austin Hays would start in center field and lose prospect eligibility; Ryan Mountcastle would have been up by midseason, and Yusniel Diaz might not have been far behind, even if he didn’t have to be added to the 40-man roster until the fall.
That would basically mean all the hitters they took high in the 2019 draft — including Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, Kyle Stowers, Zach Watson, Darrell Hernaiz and a few others — almost exclusively make up their stock of position-player prospects. The only ones really outside that group are Adam Hall and Ryan McKenna, and those guys will more likely use their speed and defense to impact games before their bats do.
So adding more college bats in the form of Kjerstad, Westburg and Haskin early and then taking Florida high school third baseman Coby Mayo late makes for another group of hitters to try to balance things out. It’s not drafting for need, but it’s also kind of a need.
5. Chris Holt’s job hasn’t changed, but maybe the urgency has.
This Orioles’ front office inherited several drafts worth of pitching talent from Dan Duquette, including top prospects Grayson Rodriguez and DL Hall, plus high-minors depth like Michael Baumann, Dean Kremer, Alexander Wells, Zac Lowther, Keegan Akin and Bruce Zimmermann, among others.
The group of targeted arms they ended up with from last year’s eighth round on went to the Gulf Coast League and Short-A Aberdeen and, as a group, pitched to a 1.85 earned-run average with more than 10 strikeouts per nine innings.
It was clear the Orioles had a plan for what it wanted in pitchers, and that includes drafting the types of arms they believe will succeed and they know how to work with. That’s where Holt, who was promoted to director of pitching after the 2019 season, comes in.
The most heartening aspect of the miserable 2019 season for Orioles fans had to have been the progress the minor league arms made, with three affiliates leading their leagues in pitching and strikeout numbers going up across the board.
Without drafting a pitcher until Iowa prep right-hander Carter Baumler in the fifth round, the Orioles will have to see if they can supplement this with the undrafted free-agent crop that can begin signing this weekend.
Otherwise, Holt and his staff of pitching coaches will essentially get to work with what they have to try to break a pitching development hex of recent years.