Oh look. The Seattle Pilots are back on the clock. Again. At this point, half the first round feels less like a draft and more like an extended Seattle team-building exercise. Somewhere around Pick #12 I started wondering if the Pilots were simply going to draft every player I like and leave the rest of the league to sort out the leftovers. To their credit, they've been remarkably committed to a philosophy. No half measures. No playing it safe....
MOCK DRAFT — PICK #15 Seattle Pilots The Seattle Pilots are back. Again. At this point, Seattle has accumulated so many premium assets that every few picks I expect them to wander back into the draft room carrying another first-round selection they found behind a couch somewhere. So far, the strategy has been remarkably consistent. Acquire talent. Ignore timelines. Embrace risk. Ask questions later. The Pilots entered the offseason with...
The league-operated Colorado Rockies are back on the clock, and after selecting Mike Lowell at Pick #7, they've got a chance to continue something they haven't really had in a while: A coherent long-term plan. That's admittedly a low bar, but we're working with what we've got. With no permanent owner yet in place, the Rockies continue to lean into the safest philosophy available: accumulate talent, don't overcomplicate things, and leave the...
Sometimes draft picks require pages of analysis. Sometimes there are multiple viable candidates. Sometimes front offices spend weeks agonizing over competing philosophies, positional value, organizational fit, and long-term projections. And sometimes the player who has been sitting at the very top of your board for weeks unexpectedly falls right into your lap. As soon as Seattle announces Paul Lo Duca at Pick #12, somewhere in St. Louis, owner...
Just when you thought the Seattle Pilots might settle down and make a sensible selection, they remind everyone that "sensible" appears nowhere in their organizational mission statement. This is already the franchise responsible for one of the biggest moves of the offseason, shipping away the first overall pick and walking away with Vladimir Guerrero. At the time, I described Seattle's strategy as a simple one: Best player available. Every pick....
The Cleveland Spiders are once again proving that consistency is overrated. They finished 80-82, which sounds disappointing until you realize the season unfolded exactly how everyone expected it to. The offense mashed. Runs were scored in bunches. Home runs flew out of ballparks. And every fifth day the pitching staff gathered together to see what new and creative ways they could stress the bullpen. In other words: a very Cleveland season. This...
Now we officially arrive at the part of the draft where things stop feeling inevitable and start feeling… negotiable. The San Diego Padres have been one of the more aggressive teams in recent memory, making splashy additions like Vinny Castilla and Mike Lieberthal to complement an already interesting core featuring Ismael Valdez and Manny Ramirez. It’s a roster that looks like it was built by someone alternating between long-term planning...
The Oakland Athletics enter this draft in a fascinating spot organizationally: cautiously optimistic, quietly improving, and emotionally recovering from the retirement of Rickey Henderson, which for many fans still feels less like a baseball transaction and more like a national tragedy. You don’t replace Rickey Henderson. You just sort of wander aimlessly for a while and hope something else exciting eventually happens. To Oakland’s credit,...
The Minnesota Twins are one of the stranger evaluations in this entire draft. On paper, the offense wasn’t terrible. In fact, several underlying rankings were actually pretty intriguing. But then you look up and realize they still finished just ninth in runs scored, which is baseball’s way of saying, “Congratulations on all those baserunners, shame about the complete inability to cash them in.” This lineup is basically Darin Erstad and...