CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN?

For the increasing number of Pirate fans following baseball's amateur draft, it's a brave new world out there. We spent years of watching Dave Littlefield treat the draft like a visit to the dentist, avoiding top talents who might be difficult to sign, adhering strictly to MLB's slot recommendations, drafting tenth round talents in round two so they'd be easy to sign, taking only college players who had less bargaining leverage . . . . In 2008, it seemed as though radical change set in when the Pirates not only drafted Scott Boras client Pedro Alvarez, but went well over slot repeatedly to sign players like Robbie Grossman, Wes Freeman and Quinton Miller. But 2008 was just the beginning. This year the Pirates got even more radical in their effort to restock a farm system left desolate by Littlefield's mismanagement, to the point where draft rounds had little meaning.

This isn't exactly news to anybody who, unlike me, was around during the draft and able to follow it. There was a lot of interesting discussion on just about every Pirate blog out there. To take just a couple examples, there was a series of draft threads on Charlie Wilmoth's blog, Bucs Dugout. On the Pirates listserv, Curtis Lyons gathered links to information about the Bucs' draftees, including a number of video links.

I'm sure anybody who read the blogs or the draft stories in the Post-Gazette is familiar with the Pirates' decision to overdraft Tony Sanchez in round one, based on their conclusion that there was no player worthy of the fourth pick in the draft.  They didn't believe they could get appropriate value out of the $5-6M or whatever they'd have had to spend on such a pick. They also appeared to overdraft several other early choices, arguably including RHP Brooks Pounders (round 2), CF Evan Chambers (3) and LHP Zackry Dodson (4). Instead, they went heavily for players in the later rounds who fell below where their talent warranted due to various factors, usually bonus demands and college commitments. The team will use the money saved by not doling out an Alvarez-sized bonus to sign many of these later round picks, making it quite likely that the Pirates will get more talent out of rounds 6-50 than they do out of rounds 1-5.

I've tried to make a list of the players who look like they'll command bonuses above MLB's recommended slot amounts. The fact is, probably any high school player drafted after round 15 or so will require above-slot money to sign, because slot money for those rounds is usually just a token amount. I've tried to include the players who'll probably command significantly over slot:

Zack von Rosenberg, RHP (6)
Trent Stevenson, RHP (7)
Billy (or Colter) Cain, LHP (8)
Jeffrey Inman, RHP (12)
Matt den Dekker, CF (16)
Jordan Cooper, RHP (17)
Josh Urban, RHP (19)
Wes Luquette, C (27)
Michael Heller, RHP (29)
Kevin Gelinas, LHP (45)

Inman and den Dekker are college draftees, Gelinas a JUCO player and the rest prep players.

This draft involved more departures from the past than just the above-slot gambit, though. There's been a thorough change in the way the team goes about stocking its farm system.

To begin with, the Pirates didn't just pass up more highly rated players to draft Sanchez. They mainly passed up more highly rated pitchers . Odd, maybe, for a team that above all desperately needs to add pitching to its system, in both quality and very large quantities. GM Neal Huntington gave a hint of the reason before the draft when he mentioned the poor track record of pitchers taken early in the draft. The astronomical failure rate for pitchers selected at the top of the draft over the last 10-15 years has been written about and quantified in many different ways. It's the worst-kept secret in baseball, yet teams have continued to bury their heads in the sand and spend valuable early picks on pitchers as if they presented the same risks as hitters. In a draft in which the strength was college pitching, the Pirates could easily have taken such a player, as they did year after year in the past, but they chose a hitter instead. They did make it clear that they'd have taken Steven Strasburg if he'd miraculously fallen to them. Still, it's possible that they've reached the conclusion that a first round pick, or at least an early one, is too valuable to spend on a player whom history has shown is almost certain to flop, unless he's regarded, as Strasburg is by many, as perhaps the best prospect in the draft's history. If so, they may be the first team daring enough to go where the evidence leads on this point and to adopt the strategy of avoiding pitchers in the first round and stocking up on them later.

Another big change for the Bucs is the emphasis on high school players. In the last few years under Littlefield, the team went overwhelmingly for "safe," low-reward college draftees. The strength of this Pirate draft, if they sign the players they want, will necessarily be prep players, mainly pitchers. If a team wants to target players with signability issues in later rounds, there isn't much choice. Because they have more leverage and because many want to go to college, it's mainly the prep players who fall to later rounds for reasons other than talent. Whether or not they prefer high school players, the Pirates' strategy forced them to go that route.

Still another change is a tendency to go for raw or struggling players who have talent but present developmental risks. The team went for several players like this, including RHP Stevenson (7), C Joseph Schoenfeld (10), and CF den Dekker (16). These are all risky picks, but if they develop the Pirates could end up with players far better than their draft positions imply.

There's an important, related factor that shouldn't be overlooked here. If the Pirates are going to rely on high school or other raw talent, they're going to have to develop the talent. Developing prospects hasn't exactly been an organizational strength since . . . well, since anybody can remember. Huntington, farm director Kyle Stark and the minor league coordinators have spent nearly two years building the minor league staffs and instituting consistent methods. The process produced some consternation over the departure of some of the minor league coaches, who apparently felt they were being reduced to mere clipboard holders. (Why exactly any Pirate fan would be concerned over the departure of any staff hired by Littlefield escapes me. It's universally accepted in Pittsburgh that Littlefield couldn't distinguish baseball talent from eating utensils. Is there some reason to believe that his judgment of coaches was radically better? Is there some evidence at the major league level that Littlefield's developmental staff knew what they were doing?) The idea of uniform practices isn't exactly unique. The Braves are well known for their standardized pitching program. Many teams have mandatory pitch counts; the Orioles, for example, once fired a AA pitching coach and reassigned the manager (Dave Cash, no less) for letting Erik Bedard exceed his pitch count. Huntington's hiring efforts brought in a number of highly accomplished people this year, including former manager of the year award winners Frank Kremblas and Matt Walbeck, and well qualified pitching coaches like Dean Treanor and Wally Whitehurst, none of whom evidently feared being reduced to a clipboard holder. Maybe there was actually a reason for the efforts to upgrade the minor league coaching.

We won't know for years whether the team's execution of its strategy will be successful.  At best, many of the players they sign will flop. What we do know is that strategy couldn't get any further removed from the practices of Huntington's spectacularly unsuccessful predecessor. And draft days aren't likely to be boring any more.

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