Draft turns into arms race between New York teams
IT started last Monday, with the Yankees taking South Carolina righthander Clarke Schmidt at No. 16. Three picks later, the Mets tabbed Oregon lefty David Peterson.
By two days later, 53 more pitchers would be added to the New York baseball teams’ haul.
The Yankees and Mets turned this year’s MLB First-Year Player Draft into their own arms race, the Yankees winding up with 28 hurlers and the Mets 27, fresh faces and fastballs to restock farm systems that are mostly plentiful in position players and needy on the rubber.
The Yankees chose pitchers with their first three selections and 10 in the first 11 rounds. Of the Mets’ first 13 picks, nine belong on the mound.
Each addition, of course, is far off, none further than Schmidt, whom the Yankees chose after he had Tommy John surgery in May. And with their second pick, the Yankees again thought long-term with Matt Sauer, an 18-year-old who’s hit 97 mph out of high school in California.
“I think the amount of power arms that we were able to put into the system,” said Damon Oppenheimer, vice president of amateur scouting for the Yankees, about what he was most pleased with from the draft. “It’s quite a haul of guys that this kind of organization, we’ve had success with. Some of the college pitching that’s in the middle rounds I think have a chance to impact the organization. The Sauer kid, the high-school power guy, is a guy that we have a chance to develop into a top-endof-the-rotation starter that everyone’s looking for now. He combines power and size and strength.”
The somehow pitchingrich and pitching-poor Mets have a well-documented arsenal at the major league level, and a few near-ready position players on the cusp of breaking through in shortstop Amed Rosario and first baseman Dominic Smith. From 2011-14, the Mets used a first-rounder on a hitter each year (Brandon Nimmo, Gavin Cecchini, Smith and Michael Conforto). They’ve now taken three pitchers in the first round the last two years (Justin Dunn, Anthony Kay and Peterson), replenishing a system that has graduated and traded some stars. The Mets picked 19th and 31st in 2016.
“We did go hitter-heavy in previous years,” said Mets vice president of amateur scouting Tommy Tanous. “But the last few years with the success of the team, we picked 19th and we picked 20th. Just how the draft has gone and how other teams draft, it can be a little more difficult to take that special hitter with the picks we have. There’s a little bit more volume of pitching there.”
While the Yankees took purported higher risks at the top of the draft — an arm fresh off surgery and a high-schooler — the Mets took slightly more mitigated chances. Their first seven pitchers selected were college products, more experienced and theoretically a step ahead of the highschool lottery tickets.
“We have had a little more success later in the draft getting guys to the big leagues, helping the bigleague club,” Tanous said. “We stayed with that philosophy. It was just kind of how this draft fell this year. We were happy with the amount of pitchers we were able to take in the later rounds.”
The Yankees, with three position players among Baseball America’s top 40 prospects, are loaded all over the minor league diamond and have the luxury to now stockpile pitchers and see who emerges. While they, too, claim the flood of pitchers was incidental — just sticking to the draft board — a team with a major league rotation filled with question marks knows how important a staff is.
“You can never have enough pitching. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s something that’s true,” Oppenheimer said. “With where we’re at, with the organization and some of the position players that we have, we didn’t shy away from anybody. This easily could have turned into three straight position players at the top of the draft. … It’s just the way our board overall lined up and how they fell to us. The philosophy of being able to get power pitching and guys that throw strikes, just seems to be those were the kinds of guys who made themselves available.”