Arizona Diamondbacks add more college pitchers as MLB draft concludes
The Diamondbacks wrapped up their draft on Tuesday with another batch of mostly college players, almost all of them pitchers.
Nine of their 10 picks on Tuesday were college players, and nine of the 10 were pitchers. The lone exceptions came in the final two rounds.
In the 19th round, the team drafted Arizona State’s Wyatt Crenshaw, whom the Diamondbacks plan to develop as an outfielder. Crenshaw is the son of Ken Crenshaw, the Diamondbacks’ director of sports medicine and performance.
Their 20th rounder was their lone high school selection out of 21 picks this year: Dominic Voegele, a left-handed pitcher out of Columbia High in Illinois.
“I definitely do not,” Diamondbacks scouting director Ian Rebhan said when a reporter jokingly asked why the team suddenly hates high school players. “We’ve drafted some really, really good ones the last few years. Let’s not start that rumor. That’s just not how it fell this year.”
Over the past few days, Rebhan has given reporters a brief synopsis of every player the club took. One theme: power stuff, even if it has come in the form of future relievers. For an organization that has been in search of swing-and-miss stuff out of its bullpen for the past several years, it felt like that search spilled into the draft more than ever before.
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“I think if you look around the big leagues right now everybody is throwing really, really hard and they’ve got really good stuff,” Rebhan said. “You look at major league bullpens and they’re all big and physical and they throw hard. Targeting that type of profile was definitely in the back of our head, for sure.”
All told 15 of the 21 picks for the Diamondbacks this week were pitchers. Four of their first six picks were position players.
“As it happens every year, the really good college bats usually go (first),” Rebhan said. “The guys left on our board were these upside power arms/potential reliever targets with really good stuff.”
Rebhan added: “I think we’re all really excited about the group. It’s a good blend of really high-upside position players and pitchers. All those things come together to make a really interesting group. It’ll be fun to watch over the next few years to see what they turn out to be.”
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Diamondbacks load up on college pitchers as MLB draft concludes
