Callis 2013 draft revisited

God it’s scary that this draft was a decade ago.

Man, looking back at the draft class from this year brings back some memories, most of them bad. I remember being an irrational Bryan Hudson guy for a little while. If you'd have told me after the Jon Denney pick that the two best major leaguers from this class would've been the 19th and 26th rounders (Gabe Speier is quietly very good), I'd have probably laughed in your face. Really the mid-point of a very unfortunate stretch of drafts from 2012-2014.

My big "what-if" from 2013 is that teams overreacted, I think, to Manaea's hip injury. I know the bonus demands probably made it tough: he got $750K more than Ball, so I can understand being wary considering the risk involved. But before the 2013 season he was considered consensus top five, was outstanding that spring when he was healthy, then dropped out of the 30 because of the injury and signability. He also lined up with what the Red Sox were valuing in amateur pitchers at the time, he's quite tall and he came in at a tough angle (though the team was really obsessed with "plane" at that point and Manaea's might not have been high enough).

It was a very bad draft, but Ball was a very poor pick even amongst it. Basically everyone, even the dudes who didn't turn into major leaguers, had more value within a couple years of the draft than Ball did. That's worth quite a bit when it comes to making trades. Frazier, for example, was a terrible major leaguer... who was the main piece in getting Cleveland 2 1/2 years of Andrew Miller. Dom Smith was a top-100 prospect into 2017, Dombrowski definitely is able to use that to frustrate everyone by trading him for a reliever.

Man I completely forgot about the name thing. Good pull.

BA had Vitek ranked #25 and called him a more physical AJ Pollock, and their draft preview said he could go as high as #9. His problems were also more injury-related than Ball (though there were warning signs pre-injury as well). So I don't agree that he was particularly a reach. On the other hand, Christian Yelich went three spots later, and he was a much more obvious miss than anyone in 2013.

It's always super interesting to revisit drafts and I've long argued that people should calm down about the Trey Ball pick.

We were all hoping for Frazier and willing to take Meadows as a consolation prize. The former has never really impacted the MLB and the later had 1 really good season but hasn't had much of a meaningful career beyond that.

I recall being super low on Colin Moran, worried that he'd never hit for power. He's actually put up a wRC+ of 98 over significant plate appearances (granted with poor defense).

As for Callis' re-evaluation, I think recency bias is impacting him a bit on Trey Mancini, who has had a pretty solid career interrupted by cancer treatment. I also think I'd rank Jon Gray and Nick Pivetta a little higher just because SPs are so hard to come by. Hard to argue with much else though and Callis of course knows his stuff better than me, so my critique is more of a question of taste than me saying, "Jim Callis is wrong!"

But yeah, it's wild how bad this class was.