The first day of the 2016 MLB draft is upon us, and the Tampa Bay Rays will have three choices at picks 13, 53, 77 tonight.
While drafts in professional leagues like the NFL or NBA almost instantaneously bear fruit, it should be remembered that Major League Baseball teams don’t choose based on need — after all, even the best players in the draft take a few years to make it to the big leagues on a regular basis. Given their 13th, 53rd, and 77th slots this time around, Tampa Bay will pick a crop of players that team representatives believe to be the best remaining talent on the board.
You may be asking, how exactly did the Rays pick up the 13th slot in the first place?
In short, draft order is the reverse order of the previous year’s standings. If two ball clubs finish with identical records, the previous year’s standings of the two is the tiebreaker, with the team having a worse record receiving the higher pick.
However, there’s more to the process that can be confusing, and that’s where Neil Solondz (Rays Radio) comes in. As Solondz noted, draft budget plays a big role in who gets drafted by whom.
Each team in the draft has a different budget, and those are determined by MLB based on two factors, their previous year’s finish, and if they received any compensation picks (either from losing high-end players to free agency or from what are called competitive balance picks). Generally the team with the number one pick has the most money to spend (slight difference this year as the Reds at number two have $13.9 M), while the teams with the best marks have the smallest budgets (Cubs this year have the smallest at $2.245 M).
Teams with large budgets have more flexibility because they can spend a little less in some spots (every player in the early rounds has a suggested slot value), and then more for a player with a high ceiling that may have dropped in the draft, to ensure they sign with their club. A good example is Houston in 2012 used its draft pool money to sign local product Lance McCullers with the number 40 pick after picking Carlos Correa number one overall.
The Rays choose 13th, and have a draft pool of $7.64 million in 2016. To guess who they will take is difficult, because it’s hard to know who the other 12 teams will choose in front of them. Here are some profiles of players that the experts have predicted the
Matt Silverman and Stu Sternberg have been open critics of the draft process, as they would like to see smaller-market teams awarded more high-round picks. It is the team’s hope that the new collective bargaining agreement will be more accommodating.
In any case, the Rays have rumored interest in four players: 3B Joshua Lowe, SS Gavin Lux, OF Blake Rutherford, and SS Delvin Perez. Solondz also briefly spoke about the four:
Joshua Lowe – 3B (projected: Jim Callis, MLB.com and Bleacher Report) – Comes from a baseball family. His dad David was a 5th round pick of the Mariners in 1986. His older brother Nathaniel, a junior first baseman at Mississippi State, also could be a first-day selection. Joshua Lowe throws right-handed and hits left-handed and played this year at Pope HS in Marietta, GA, where he hit 11 homers in the regular season, and hit over .400. While he also threw up to 95 miles per hour on the mound, he’s projected as a position player.
Gavin Lux – SS (projected: Jonathan Mayo, MLB.com, Baseball America, and Keith Law ESPN.com) – Lux also comes from good bloodlines as his uncle Augie Schmidt was the number two pick in the 1982 draft and currently is a Division III baseball coach. A shortstop at Indian Trail HS, Lux could be the first player taken in the first round from the state of Wisconsin since 1988. The 6-2 175 pounder hits left and is known as a good shortstop defensively with power potential.
Blake Rutherford – OF (projected: Sporting News) – From Chaminade Prep HS in Canoga Park, CA, Rutherford is older than most HS players. He turned 19 on May 2nd. However, he’s also known as a polished hitter. Rutherford played on the USA 18-under team and hit a decisive home run to win a game on the team’s march to a gold medal in Japan. The high school league he played in (Mission League) has included such standouts as Giancarlo Stanton and Kevin Pillar, so it’s known for good competition. Rutherford batted .577 with 45 hits, including 13 doubles and four home runs, this season.
Delvin Perez SS – (projected: Sports Illustrated and CBS Sportsline) this is one of the tougher players in the draft to project as this week reports surfaced that Perez had tested positive for an unnamed performance-enhancing drug. Before recently falling on most boards, the 17-year-old was projected as a top 5 pick. The shortstop from Puerto Rico was considered to have some of the best overall tools in this year’s draft.