The Miami Marlins’ 2020 draft in summary: Pitching, pitching and more pitching
DJ Svihlik alluded to it Wednesday night, shortly after the Miami Marlins selected Minnesota right-handed pitcher Max Meyer with the No. 3 overall pick. The shortened 2020 Major League Baseball Draft is loaded with top-end pitching talent.
Add to that the fact that the Marlins prioritized position players early in the past two drafts, and it made sense for Miami to have a concerted effort to load up on as many arms as they could.
They followed through with that plan.
The Marlins followed up the Meyer selection by drafting pitchers with all five of their picks on Thursday to round out the five-round draft.
Miami’s Day 2 picks:
▪ Mustang (Oklahoma) High School left-handed pitcher Daxton Fulton with the 40th overall pick in the second round.
▪ Ball State right-handed pitcher Kyle Nicolas with the 61st overall pick in the competitive balance B round.
▪ Coastal Carolina right-handed pitcher Zach McCambley with the 75th overall pick in the third round.
▪ Vanderbilt left-handed pitcher Jake Eder with the 104th overall pick in the fourth round.
▪ USC right-handed pitcher Kyle Hurt with the 134th overall pick in the fifth round.
“It was super important,” Svihlik said. “Pitching is always important. Whether it’s this year or next year. What do they say? You need three to get one. Pitching depth is really important. You see that every year at the Winter Meetings. They’re targets of trade. They’re very, very valuable. When it lines up in a year like this where it’s pitching-heavy, you take what the draft is offering you.”
And this year, the draft gave the Marlins a half-dozen flamethrowers to add to their organization to bulk up depth behind their top prospects.
There’s Fulton, who was viewed as the consensus top left-handed high school pitcher this draft. His fastball runs between 90-94 mph and it’s complemented by a plus curveball and an above-average changeup. He has size at 6-6 and 225 pounds. However, he’s coming off Tommy John surgery, so that’s something to monitor.
There’s Nicolas, whose fastball has touched 100 mph and is consistently in the mid-90s. He split time as a starter and a reliever in two-plus seasons at Ball State and struck out 170 batters in 131 2/3 innings.
His final collegiate performance was one to remember: 7 innings, one hit allowed and 17 strikeouts against Sacred Heart on March 6.
There’s McCambley, a 6-1 righty who had a 1.80 ERA and was holding opponents to a .208 batting average through four starts before the 2020 season was halted. His curveball is one of the best in the draft class and its packaged with a fastball that touches 96 mph.
There’s Eder, a 6-4, 210-pound lefty who MLBPipeline had ranked as the No. 59 overall prospect. He has a fastball that sits between 92-95 mph and touches 97 as well as an above-average curveball. Eder, a Palm Beach county native who played his senior year of high school at Fort Lauderdale Calvary Christian, closed out Vanderbilt’s 2019 College World Series win against Michigan with a three-inning save. He moved into the starting rotation for 2020. Eder struck out 27 of 88 batters that he faced in the shortened season.
And finally there’s Hurt, a 6-3, 215-pound righty who started 30 of his 36 career games for USC and held opponents to a .190 batting average in 2020. He struck out 170 of 766 batters he faced as a Trojan. Hurt’s fastball tops out around 97 mph, and he has a plus changeup. He also has a slider and curveball in his repertoire, both of which need improvement if they’re going to be quality pitches at the next level.
The picks give the Marlins their next wave of top-end pitching talent in their minor-league system. Heading into the draft, 13 of organization’s top-30 prospects according to MLBPipeline are pitchers. Five — Sixto Sanchez (No. 1), Edward Cabrera (No. 5), Braxton Garrett (No. 6), Trevor Rogers (No. 8) and Nick Neidert (No. 10) — rank among the top 10 for the franchise.
What’s next
Teams are allowed to start signing undrafted free agents on Sunday. Signing bonuses this year are capped at $20,000. There is no limit to the number of undrafted players a team can sign.
However, with the uncertainty of what the minor-league landscape will look like after the draft — the 2020 minor-league baseball season is not expected to be played and there’s no guarantee it will stay in its current format when it does resume — it makes sense for teams to go for quality over quantity when it comes to signing undrafted players.
“We don’t want to sign a bunch of $20,000 players,” Svihlik said before the draft. “We want to sign good players for $20,000. Our scouts are spending a lot of time getting to know these players and trying to figure out which ones are real possibilities and which players are just going to go back to school.”
This story was originally published June 11, 2020 at 9:50 PM.
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