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September 28, 2009

Future Shock

Buyer's Remorse

by Kevin Goldstein

I say it pretty much any time I'm talking about a recent draft—one really needs somewhere between three and five years to properly measure a draft, but that doesn't mean we can't at least make some assumptions. Now that we've had a full year to evaluate the players from the class of 2008, here are ten teams that might be suffering from some form of buyer's remorse.

Tim Beckham, SS, Rays (First overall)
Look, is Beckham really a bust already? Of course he isn't. At the same time, go down a list of the other 29 first-round picks and ask yourself how many you'd take over Beckham. If you're especially down on him, you could easily get into the double digits with that list, and for a guy who went first overall and received a $6.15 million bonus, that's not a good thing. He's still an impressive athlete with plenty of upside, and definitely a Top 100 prospect, but his .275/.328/.389 line at Low-A Bowling Green with 43 errors in the field generated a lot of questions.

Eric Hosmer, 1B, Royals (Third overall)
Hosmer's season was a long-form disaster that never ended. He hit .220 without a home run in his first 24 games for Low-A Burlington, but for many, it was reminiscent of how 2007 first-round pick Mike Moustakas struggled mightily at Burlington in 2008 before making adjustments and becoming the league's most dangerous hitter during the second half of the season. But those adjustments never happened for Hosmer; he showed a quick swing with plenty of leverage, but just never made hard contact in games, as he struggled to hit breaking balls and his set-up far from the plate left him lunging at pitches. Things got no better following a mysterious and undeserved promotion to High-A Wilmington, and he took time off at the end of the year for Lasik surgery to correct some vision problems. He did hit a walk-off home run in the Carolina League playoffs, but one at-bat is not enough to write off what happened in the 400+ PAs that came before.

Kyle Skipworth, C, Marlins (Sixth overall)
Sure, they kind of had to go cheap, but that doesn't mean that they had to go wrong. Picking Skipworth here was certainly excusable at the time—even if he was a budget-minded selection, Skipworth was the best high school catcher on the board. Seen as an offense-first type of player, that offense has yet to show up as a pro; in 113 games, he has career averages of .208/.263/.345. There are still some positives here, as scouts do see tools and upside in him, but 2010 will be a critical year for him to save his prospect status.

Yonder Alonso, 1B, Reds (Seventh overall)
Like the Beckham comment, this isn't necessarily a bad pick, as Alonso had a solid but unspectacular full-season debut, this is more about what could have been: in the hours leading up to the draft, the Reds were torn between Alonso and University of Georgia shortstop Gordon Beckham. Alonso looks like he might be a power/on-base first baseman with problems hitting against left-handers, while Beckham looks like a future star with a chance to be a "face of the franchise"-type of player. So there are no big complaints about what they have, as long as you don't think about what could have been.