Assessing the Yankees’ two picks on Day 1 of the 2024 MLB Draft
What are we to make of the two SEC pitchers who the Yankees selected in the first two rounds?
The MLB Draft process has wildly evolved over the last decade. With the introduction of radars and cameras, there is a data point for every possible thing you can imagine.
While there is still a significant in-person scouting effort, especially on the prep side, the availability and improvement of Trackman data in the collegiate ranks make for an interesting internal power struggle in each front office between scouts and analysts. In reality, the smartest organizations employ both and weigh the opinions of scouts and models.
Some scouts acknowledge how it’s become easier to scout off a video, so they’ve reinvented themselves as pseudo-psychologists to gain a better understanding of how a player’s personality and makeup might fit within their organization. Organizations have picked up on mental conditioning as the next frontier of baseball analysis, and consequently,
there is a Cold War-like arms race among teams to employ psychologists and mental coaches. My point is that the draft process is completely different from a decade ago: the traits that teams look for aren’t what they were in 2010.
That leads me to the first prospect the Yankees chose last night with the 26th overall pick, that being Alabama right-hander Ben Hess.
Hess is a beast of a human (what else is new with Yankees draft picks?), standing at 6-foot-5 and over 250 pounds. You might take an initial glance at Hess’s season stats (5.80 ERA in 68.1 IP) and wonder, “What are the Yankees thinking?”
