Continuing my retrospective Mets draft series, I thought it would be fun to look back and see who got drafted by the Mets in rounds 1 thru 5 in years 2005 through 2021, how those draftees panned out, and which of them (and which from rounds beyond round 5) made it to the dance. I've been doing it a year at a time.
Today?
The Mets' 2015 Draft:
Gosh, the first 5 rounds of 2015's draft were DREADFUL in terms of the real purpose of drafts, which is to help the mother ship Mets at some point!
Round 1 - pass! The prior two years were Dom Smith and Michael Conforto, but you need a first round pick to get that kind of quality. The Mets didn't keep theirs.
The loss of that one was due to them getting David Wright's buddy Michael Cuddyer from Colorado, who hit .330+ in two straight years in Colorado, but just .259 in his one Mets season. But he retired, saving the Mets a large outlay in 2016.
I wonder if they might have grabbed 24th overall Walker Buehler with that pick if they had kept it.
Round 2 - Desmond Lindsay - he never got it going when he wasn't hurt - and he was hurt an awful lot. Hit about .175 in roughly 110 at bats in 2019 and 2021. Used up all his sick days.
Round 3 - Max Wotell - briefly showed promise, then got hurt. 3-6, 6.81 in 74 minor league innings. Interestingly, he was part of the Mets' trade to acquire Jay Bruce. Since the Mets couldn't keep this Max, they made up for it a bit by signing Max Scherzer.
Round 4 - David Thompson - he has been injured too often, hampering any effort to build on early minors success. A career .507 slug % and a fine RBI guy - he knocked in 95 in just 116 games in 2016. But just 1,823 at bats in total from 2015-21, and only 218 games from 2017 thru 2021. But there are a lot of "what-if" guys who never make it. Health matters.
Round 5 - Tom Szapucki - he did debut in 2021 with the Mets - the results were far from scintillating. A past TJ surgery, then a long recovery, and now a 2021 season cut short by ulnar nerve realignment surgery. Will he ever achieve what it looked like he might when he went 4-3, 1.38 ERA in the lower minors in 2016 with a whopping 86 Ks in 52 innings? Maybe, but my early enthusiasm has been tempered quite a bit. I am now in "I'll believe it when I see it" mode.
After Round 5? Pat Mazeika went in the 8th round, and picked the right position, catcher, to make it to the big leagues in a (so far) marginal way. A round later, Kevin Kaczmarski was drafted. A decent hitter with limited power, akin to Eric Campbell, he only had a walk in 5 plate appearances in the majors. Both Mazeika and Kaczmarski hit over .350 in their Kingsport rookie league debuts.
2015 was simply a dreadful draft year, stifled by injuries. Only a resurrected Szapucki could resurrect this Mets draft.
Speaking of retrospectives on this Friday, as this Cohen-owned team is preparing to soar, a link is included below to a song with the line, “well, eagle flies on Friday”, performed by Mountain back in 1971….Stormy Monday….give it a listen if you care to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RsXs49K3lU
2016? My next article, friends.
9 comments:
I know that drafts are pretty much a crap shoot, but reading your reviews really makes me shake my head.
How the heck could they miss so often? It's almost like they tried to fail?
At least the last few years have been better, so here's hoping that the future drafts follow suit.
Mike, the one thing I am not doing (and which frankly would take too much work for me) is to see how we rank in terms of draft effectiveness over the decades.
The Mets have been better drafting of late, but were awful in drafting hitters more often than not.
My brother looks at it this way: think of all the MLB hitting stars over the years, and the relatively few true hitters that the Mets in almost 60 years of drafting have produced. They drafted Darryl, who was a consensus # 1, but where are our drafted HOF sluggers? Where is our Bernie Williams, for that matter? Awful. Alonso is a big step in the right direction, but those steps have been all too few. Even a David Wright was excellent but you can name 100 hitters over the past 50 years who put together greater hitting careers.
Where are our drafted star catchers? Etc.
Over the 55 or so draft years, for developing star hitters thru the draft? They get an F
A better question is how does baseball do in comparison to other professions when it comes to securing the best available personnel? Think about your own place of employment where you pick any number of less-than-perfect folks and hope they can work their way into being productive for you at the level you hope. Eventually you keep them because it's less costly to do so than to recruit and train others.
We’ve trained lots of undesirables, Reese. The franchise is 376 games below .500 since inception. Yankees are 2,566 games over .500. How do you spell DISPARITY?
Reese, to look at that disparity another way, the Met would have to go 162-0 over the next 19 seasons to equal the Yankees’ + Wins total
2015 was a tough draft by any measure. The injury cases are shocking, and leads one to ask, did the Mets do enough to nurture their health during the development years? This may have been a much better draft if those players didn't spend so much time hurt.
You could honestly throw darts at a list of names on the wall and have better results. Tom how about our international results?
Paul, you really do have to wonder whether this team helps or hurts its prospects, in terms of staying healthy. But injuries, far more than ever before, are part of baseball, especially in Flushing.
Gary, how many signed young internationals who later reached stardom have played for the Mets? Last I checked, we did not get Vlad Guerrero or Shohei Ohtani. Or Soto or Acuna. Over the decades, do they get a D grade on international? Perhaps
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