ORLANDO — Randy Winn had not even fully gotten off the podium in a dark conference room at the Signia By Hilton Hotel when Michael Holmes ran up with a fist bump. The look on the face of the Giants’ director of amateur scouting said it all.
“He’s very excited about that,” Winn said, smiling.
Winn just finished his first year as the organization’s VP of player development, and on Tuesday night, he and the Giants got a huge, well, win.
They moved way up in the MLB Draft lottery and will pick fourth next summer. By record, they should have had the 15th pick, and they entered the night with the 12th-best odds of picking first overall in MLB’s calculations, which punish some teams for repeatedly being in the lottery.
But as other teams got named, Winn realized that something cool was happening. He couldn’t fully focus on that, though.
“My phone was buzzing from former teammates of mine heckling me while I was up there,” Winn said. “I could name a few. It was actually a few of my Tampa teammates sending me text messages saying ‘don’t screw it up’ and some other very nice things. ‘You look terrible up there.’ Those sort of things. Who needs enemies when you have friends like that.”
The reception was surely much different when he returned to the organization’s suite at the hotel here.
This will be the Giants’ first time picking inside the top five since 2018, when they chose Joey Bart second overall. It’s just the fifth time, period, that they’ll pick inside the top five. Three of those previous picks turned into Will Clark, Matt Williams and Buster Posey.
Winn said it was an “exciting time” for the player development staff, and this could be a huge boost to a farm system that is on the rise. They also are poised to sign the top international position player prospect for a second straight year, with Venezuelan shortstop Luis Hernandez likely to sign with the organization in the middle of January. Throw Hernandez in with a top-four pick and last year’s top addition, Josuar Gonzalez, and the Giants will have a needed injection of young talent.
The Giants entered the lottery with a one percent chance of getting the top pick. For a moment, Winn started to dream, but the Chicago White Sox ended up winning the lottery.
“I didn’t want to get too far ahead of myself but I did know that based on how things worked, if we weren’t called by 15 that we would be inside the top six. Once we weren’t six and then once we weren’t five, I was like, well, maybe,” he said. “Drafting is hard, but we’re definitely excited to be picking so early in the draft. It’s been a while since I believe we’ve drafted this high. We’ve got some time and we’ve got some work to do ahead of us.”
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