In previous years, we'd be roughly a month away from the Draft at this point and the picture would be coming into clearer focus. But with the event pushed back to July 11 and teams having less history than ever on college players because of the pandemic, it's still very
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The 2021 MLB Draft is still 11 weeks away, and there’s a tremendous amount still unknown and to be decided in terms of who goes where in the first round. But that won’t stop us from trying to guess.
“Guess” might be the operative word in this first mock draft of the season. Jim Callis and I will alternate in trying to bring you the best projections we can, with the hope that the ones we post right before the July 11 Draft come as close to getting it right as we can.
For this first go-round, I tried to run names by as many teams and scouting director types as possible. The main objective: to have names in each spot that make some sense and are feasible, so I kept permutations for each team to a minimum (There are simply too many at this point.). Consider this a snapshot of names that could land in the first round, with the plan to bring that picture into greater focus as we get closer to the Draft.
April 20th, 2021
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The MLB Draft is still three months away, but our experts, Jim Callis and Jonathan Mayo, are set to release an updated and expanded Draft Top 150 later this week. While they won’t give the order away in advance, they did offer a sneak preview on the latest Pipeline Podcast.
Guided by host Jason Ratliff, Callis and Mayo alternated making the first 20 picks of the Draft, based on their personal preferences and not trying to project what each club will actually do. They split the first four choices between a pair of Vanderbilt right-handers and a pair of high school shortstops.
The 2021 MLB draft picture is coming into focus now, with all the top prospects playing for multiple weeks and plenty of time for pop-up types to be seen multiple times by each team. After this group of the top 100 players plus seven who just missed, things really open up and there s a seemingly endless number of players you could squint at and see sneaking into the fourth round if things break right.
Texas high school shortstop Jordan Lawlar and Vanderbilt ace Jack Leiter started to separate themselves as a clear top tier in this group. Beyond them, a pretty consensus second tier has formed, with the majority of teams calling it an overall top eight with the players listed below in a similar order, but there s obviously some room for disagreement toward the tail end of Tier 2 and the top of Tier 3.