Bill Roper's Journal

Our annual baseball draft was today. And there was much entertainment.

I have a monster starting pitching staff coming back along with enough relief pitching to be able to easily fill in the blanks, so the thing I was most interested in correcting was my hitting, which is a bit weak, especially at catch (where it's a real problem) and in the outfield (where I've collected a tremendous amount of decent, but not exceptional outfield talent).

There were two fine young outfielders available in this year's draft, Jason Heyward and Mike Stanton. The first was substantially more desirable and there was no chance he was going to last until I drafted with the seventh pick out of eight teams.

I had previously discussed a tentative deal with jdonat who has Braun and Hamilton in his outfield, thus having his requisite number of outfield studs. When Rich H., as he'd announced that he planned to, snagged Buster Posey with the first pick in the draft, I said to John, "Want to do it?" John answered "Sure!"

So I sent my first round pick, Bobby Abreu, and Rickey Weeks to John for his first round pick which I used to select Jason Heyward. No one seemed greatly surprised by this somehow. And it nicely rebalanced our two teams.

It was then a long, long wait for my second pick when I collected young Cleveland catcher Carlos Santana. He went nicely with Matt Wieters and Yadier Molina, who I already had. And sooner or later, one of them should hit. :)

I then filled out the bullpen with Luke Gregerson and Javier Lopez, a good young reliever and an ancient LOOGY, respectively. Because I had no competent third base backup behind Longoria, I added Pittsburgh's Pedro Alvarez and the Cardinals' David Freese.

And finally, in the XB round where we can draft players who won't be allowed to play this year because they didn't get regular cards, I picked up White Sox outfield prospect Dayan Viciedo.

Overall, an eminently satisfactory draft. :)