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The day before

by Matt Smith

By this time tomorrow, we will know who the Tampa Bay Rays decided to choose to be the number one pick of the 2008 Amateur draft. 

It’s a prestigious, not to mention lucrative, honour although it carries no guarantees of a future MLB career, let alone a Hall of Fame career.  The Pittsburgh Pirates’ decision to select pitcher Bryan Bullington in 2002 is perhaps the most notable case in recent years of a Number One bust.  Even if they were determined to choose a pitcher, they could have had Zack Greinke, Jeff Francis, Joe Saunders, Scott Kazmir, Cole Hamels, Joe Blanton or Matt Cain instead, to name but seven others drafted in the top 25 that year.

Ouch.

The trouble with the draft is that however good your scouts are and however much statistical analysis you conduct, it’s never going to be an exact science.  It’s easy to look back on a draft six years later and say “they should have picked x” (as I’ve just shown), but there are so many factors that can result in a prospect simply not panning out.  All you can do is make a decision with the best information available at the time. 

Kevin Goldstein has just published his mock draft at Baseball Prospectus and he has catcher Buster Posey going number one.  MLB.com believes the Rays will take Tim Beckham (at time of writing at least).  Even that one decision can have a significant knock-on effect, so it’s difficult to predict with much certainty how things will shape up.  That’s what makes it an exciting event.

You can follow my live blog of the first round from 19.00 (BST) tomorrow here at BaseballGB.

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