Morning A’s fans!

The MLB Draft Lottery was last night and for the third straight year the Athletics got the short end of the stick, getting a selection that was lower than was was expected. Luckily things have worked out well enough with the first two (Jacob Wilson and Nick Kurtz), but it’s still frustrating as a fan to watch your team lose all these games for years and not even get a top pick. The freaking Giants are ahead of the A’s at #4. A sick and cruel joke, if you ask me.

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Anyway, no time to cry about it. It’s time to look ahead and start learning about some of the possible picks the A’s could make. We still have seven whole months to go before the actual draft but it doesn’t hurt to peak ahead. Next year’s draft class is supposedly much deeper than last year’s when we added Kurtz to the org. That bodes well for the A’s especially after their drop in the pecking order. We should be able to add another impact top prospect to join Leo De Vries and Jamie Arnold on the list.

Four of the top prospects in the draft are shortstops and all look likely to go quickly. The White Sox and Rays in particular will almost certainly begin the draft taking Roch Cholowsky and Grady Emerson and even if they didn’t they likely wouldn’t fall into the A’s range. After that it starts to open up a bit more. It’d be a mild surprise to see either of the other two shortstops in Justin Lebron or Jacob Lombard drop to the #8 range but if they’re there they could be the pick. Yes, the A’s already have De Vries in the system but you take the best player available, even if its not an immediate organizational need. These things tend to sort themselves out.

The top outfielder in the draft, Georgia Tech’s Drew Burress, is also likely to be gone by the time the A’s pick. The second-best however, Derek Curiel, is a legitimate option if he’s there when the A’s come up on the clock.

And then there are the pitching options. This seems like the most likely route the A’s will go if none of the above mentioned names have fallen to them, and even then they may still decide to stockpile on more pitching a year after using their first rounder on a pitcher in Jamie Arnold. The top two pitchers in this draft are both left-handers, Carson Bolemon and Gio Rojas. Both are just 18 years old high schoolers but if the A’s went this route then they could have a future rotation led by Arnold, Gage Jump, and one of these two. A trio of left-handers at the top of the rotation, with potentially a fully-developed Luis Medina, could cause some ruckus.

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Of course, there could and likely will be names that rise up the prospect rankings that we aren’t even aware of yet. Last year’s first overall pick Eli Willits was a solid prospect but really shot up the rankings on his way to being taken by Washington. We’ll just have to wait and get closer to Draft Day before we really get a good feel for which direction the team will go. You can be sure they have their scouts working on all of these guys right now.

Anyway, we’ll still get an impact prospect to the organization. And on that note, have a great hump day everyone.

A’s Coverage:

MLB News and Interest:

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Best of X:

Which player do you think he’s talking about?

Joe Rudi was the Athletics’ rep at the Lottery yesterday:

Our DH can swing anything:

Ugh:

Hey, we could always end up selecting the next Lindor at #8: