Alex Anthopoulos draft

How Great Were Alex Anthopoulos’ Drafts?

Yesterday, I took a look back at Blue Jays drafts held under the regimes of Gord Ash and J.P. Ricciardi, in an effort to look at what makes a good draft for the Jays. Unlike that piece, which focused on trying to evaluate the tenures of general managers who have been gone long enough to do some honest to goodness analysis about their successes and failures, today’s piece functions as a mid-point check in for the Anthopoulos draft era.

Alex Anthopoulos

In order to do this, I tracked every player who was drafted under Anthopoulos who has played an inning of affiliated baseball in 2017. This does mean that my method will miss many of the high school draft picks from the more recent drafts, as some of them won’t have reached full season baseball yet. I don’t think there are many glaring people I’m missing out on, but at the same time I’m sure someone will emerge.

Note that stats for this article were compiled Sunday, June 11th.

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That 2010 class! Whew. I just needed to towel myself off for a second. Coming away from a draft with two ace level pitchers and then adding a full handful of major league contributors is absolutely incredible. What makes this year even more impressive is that the Blue Jays did this without even an iota of production from their top pick, Deck McGwire.

One of the defining aspects of Anthopoulos’ drafting tenure was his tendency to not sign his first round pick but then somehow still come out looking like roses. The 2011 draft was the best example of this, where the Blue Jays passed on signing first round pick Tyler Beede. Under the old drafting system, AA was able to take the money he’d planned on spending on Beede and divert it to third round pick Daniel Norris (who’s a much better pitcher than Beede by himself), and then select Marcus Stroman (also much better than Beede) with the compensatory pick the following year.

This pattern repeated itself in 2013 when they failed to sign ninth overall pick Phil Bickford. Due to the new draft slotting system, the team lost the slot budget that came with the pick, but Anthopoulos was still able to secure high upside prospects Rowdy Tellez and Jake Brentz with the overages they would’ve spent on Bickford. He then turned around and took Jeff Hoffman with the compensatory pick the next season. Bickford has fought injury troubles and is now suspended 50 games for marijuana while Tellez is knocking on the door of the big leagues in AAA and Jeff Hoffman is absolutely dominating in Colorado. This definitely isn’t strategy that I would recommend teams taking up, but it was shockingly effective for Mr. Anthopoulos.

Alex Anthopoulos clearly put an emphasis on acquiring pitchers through the draft process, which is one that I think is rare these days especially after looking what the Cubs did to create the backbone of their rebuild. The common thought is that pitchers are risky and always break, so you’re much better off drafting and developing hitters and then using those assets to trade for more established, safer pitchers. Anthopoulos turned this theory on its head by being shockingly consistent at producing major league pitching talent.

On the flip side however, Anthopoulos and his team’s ability to draft hitting talent was nowhere near as strong. The club didn’t invest many high draft picks in the process, so the failure of D.J. Davis and the unfortunate injury that marred Max Pentecost’s first few professional seasons have an outsized impact on this impression.

I’ve always thought that creativity and outside the box thinking was Anthopoulos’ greatest asset as a general manager and I think the greatest example of that is Anthony Alford. I’m not sure there’s another executive that would’ve had the guts to pay someone nearly a seven figure signing bonus with the understanding that he’d still be able to play football. Most other teams would’ve just let the kid go to college, fail in his football dream, then try and draft him once he was eligible after college. Anthopoulos paid him, let him go to school, and play baseball part time just so he could get such a talent into the system.

I’m not sure that this is a strategy that would have a high degree of success. Alford could’ve gotten hurt playing football, he could’ve been too good at football to come back to baseball, and his lack of reps during key years could’ve led to atrophy. However Anthopoulos saw that talent there, and took the jump. That’s what I want in my team’s executive.

At the same time that if I want to give Anthopoulos points for the process involved in the Anthony Alford selection, even if it hasn’t borne fruit yet at the major league level, I feel I need to throw cold water on the process behind the only starting calibre position player drafted under Anthopoulos, Kevin Pillar. While Pillar is a fantastic underdog story, it’s not one that can be credited to the draft process. When you’re taking a college player in the 32nd round, you are only looking for someone to fill out your low level minor league teams. The credit for Pillar’s success goes not to the scout who found him, but to the development staff that worked with him, and of course to Pilllar himself for the hard work he put in to make it to the major leagues.

Finally, while there isn’t much point on doing this type of work for the Atkins/Shapiro era, its nice and easy to take a look at his only draft, which frankly is shaping up wonderfully.

Ross Atkins/Mark Shapiro

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Even with T.J. Zeuch off to a bit of an underwhelming start in Dunedin, this is already shaping up to be quite a decent draft. Third round pick Bo Bichette is shaping up to be a superstar with a 1.000+ OPS while playing shortstop and second base in Lansing, where he shouldn’t be much longer.

The other story of this draft after just the first year is first baseman Bradley Jones, who Gideon Turk profiled on the site in late May. Jones was a late round college pick who, after destroying the Mid-West League for most the first half of the year, has gotten the bump to Dunedin. There isn’t a model of prospect that I’m leerier of than college first baseman, they usually come crashing down to reality once hitting the upper levels (see McBroom, Ryan and Dantzler, L.B.), but this is a very fun ride for as long as it lasts.

That’s it for Shapiro/Atkins, but this list will continue to grow today with the Blue Jays having two picks in the first round of the 2017 First Year Player Draft.

Lead Photo © Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

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