[Westheim]

2028 DRAFT POOL ANALYSIS

The 2028 draft was going to be one of those barren lands again… for position players. I went over the entry lists with our head scout (Lopez? Dominguez? Somethingez?) and there was really hardly any batting prospect that stood out with a certain 'wow!' effect. By contrast the pitching selection was once again quite rich and varied and many teams could get a hurler that they could hope for being a productive member of their rotation a few years down the road.

The Critters would have the #20 pick in every round, so it was not like we could eye somebody on BNN's top 10 list or could bank on getting somebody from our hotlist, which this year contained the following 14 names (*indicates high school player):

SP Adam Brochu (14/13/12) * – BNN #5
SP Matt Hose (13/15/12) * – BNN #4
SP Domingo Murillo (16/13/12)
SP Emilio DeClerk (12/14/14) – BNN #7
SP Chris Miller (13/13/11) – BNN #3
SP Darren Brown (12/11/10) *

CL John Woods (18/14/11)
CL Chris Wise (18/13/10)

C Bryant Raymond (11/10/9)

1B Jakobe Lambeth (14/9/8) *
INF Matt Locke (9/12/11)
INF/RF Justin Marsingill (10/8/9)

OF Kyle Beard (14/7/10) *
OF/2B Chris Russell (12/7/8) *

Even the BNN top 10 contained eight pitchers and only two position players… There were a total of 93 players on the shortlist of generally-interesting-but-not-necessarily-Hall-of-Famers.

There was an interesting quirk still going on; there was still an unsigned type A free agent, former Elks hurler Andrew Gudeman. The 34-year-old 1-time All Star had been through all sorts of problems (injury and otherwise) in the last years, and the type A moniker certainly hadn't helped him one bit. Nobody had taken a flyer on him, and it was unlikely that somebody would take a flyer on him between now and the draft either.

Also, for the first time in a while a team had managed to drink away all of its first four picks. That team was the Pacifics, who had doled out their picks in the first four rounds to the Buffaloes, Scorpions, Bayhawks, and Scorpions again, respectively, and they would not get to make a selection until the #134 pick!

Contrast that with the Titans, who had bled some in the offseason, but had kept their own #24 pick, had gotten the second and third selection in the second round as compensation, as well as no less than four supplemental round picks. This meant that the Titans had their first pick at #24, but would pick a total of seven times inside the top 50. There had been a draft about 30 years ago where the Raccoons had made six selections in the top 60 and had gotten nothing out of it, so this was interesting to follow…