It’s one week on from MLB Draft Day. Not only are all the picks in, but all the Angels picks have actually been signed – a fairly unusual occurrence, as there are typically a couple late round selections that opt to go to college before the signing deadline passes.
There’ve been a number of takes to date on what I’ll call the Angels’ “bullpen and babes” approach to this year’s draft, and many fans are coming to embrace it. I’m always one to respect differences and try to learn from them, but taking stock, one thing is abundantly clear:
The Angels under Perry Minasian and I couldn’t be more different when it comes to draft strategy, especially in 2025.
When it comes to objectives and bonus pool management, player archetypes we prioritize, overall economic approach, and risk tolerance – we’re essentially polar opposites.
For those who followed my draft series this year, you’ll know that I prioritized two player profiles: positional players with power upside and performant college pitchers with strong starter viability. There are three primary motivations for this: (1) the Angels have very little in the way of power bats and projectable starters on their farm; (2) they really struggle to obtain impact bats and viable starting pitching in free agency, especially at affordable rates; and (3) impact bats and starting pitchers tend to hold their trade value longer and to a greater degree than other profiles as they’re developed.
So, to me it’s simple: scarcity, market dynamics and value retention set the strategy.
But the Angels were having none of it.
While I stated outright that I’d prefer a bat-heavy draft at a 2:1 ratio (bats to arms), Minasian actually embraced that ratio, but flipped it on its head.
14 of their 21 draft picks were pitchers – including their first four selections, and 7 of their first 10. They didn’t draft a single bat ranked in the top 200, and when it came to college starting pitchers, they selected exactly one, Tyler Bremner, with their first selection. The remaining selections were six college relievers, and SEVEN high school pitchers.
(Yes, a few of those relievers will be given some rope to attempt to gain length and start – Chase Shores, maybe Alton Davis or Angelo Smith – but that’s not unusual, and there’s a strong likelihood they revert to bullpen roles in a year or two.)
Now, I really dislike using early round draft selections on relievers. I’m not alone in this – only one other team used their 2nd round selection on a bullpen guy (Tennessee’s AJ Russell went to the Rangers), and Russell has much more plausible starter conversion traits (MLB Pipeline: “the upside of a frontline starter and the stuff to close games if he can’t handle a rotation workload”). That’s because relievers are extremely volatile, and well, rather cheap and fungible. Starters can fail and become relievers. Good relievers can be sourced from all sorts of places, often very affordably: MiLB free agents, NRI spring training invites, pop-guys in the late rounds. (Mariano Rivera was signed as a free agent at age 21 for $2500. Kenley Jansen was a UDFA catcher who converted to pitching at age 23.) Most analytically oriented teams don’t spend big draft capital on the bullpen, period.
I also don’t need to rehearse how risky prep pitching is. Apart from very exceptional kids, it’s often half a dozen years of investment to yield returns, and due to the increasing strength of college programs and the introduction of NIL monies, it’s a very expensive player archetype to invest in. Mistakes will be many, and those mistakes will be more expensive ones, as bonus demands are much higher now. Why not go to college, after all, and reenter the draft at age 21 with a degree?
So this the Angels draft class is a very unorthodox draft class to say the least.
Most teams draft for the bullpen in the later rounds, and might sprinkle in 2-3 prep arms while focusing on collegiate performers and upside prep bats – the latter of which actually have a pretty good track record. It’s hard to overstate how much McIlvaine and Minasian are going against the grain this year. I’ve likened this year’s draft to the Eddie Bane draft of 2010 (ostensibly the one Tony Reagins fired him for), when he had tons of extra draft picks and used them on several raw HS athletes who ultimately didn’t pan out. Had he succeeded with even a couple of them, he’d be hailed as one of the most brilliant draft gurus of all time, but lotto tickets don’t pop off consistently.
So, again, this was literally the polar opposite of my shadow draft – a high-risk contrarian strategy that puts a lot of faith in a very new pitching facility in Arizona. We’ll see what happens, and how much opportunity was seized, or left on the table, when we look back in a few years.
And for that reason, I think it’s arguably fun, and maybe even useful, to lay out my homework here in public, so 3-5 years down the road, we can look back and see which approach was more fruitful at this juncture of team-building.
Grading the Homework
I don’t think I have to convince anyone that I tend to have some strong opinions on draft talent, and on the economics of player development and free agency. I’ve been publishing draft takes in some form across a few websites for over a dozen years, so it’s becoming easier to look back and assess my track record, for better or worse.
Even though I’ve tended to create my own spreadsheets and target “boards” of the top 150-200 players each year going back to pre-Dipoto times, I don’t always publish them as expansively as I did this year. I happened to have a month off from more dedicated professional work this summer, so I went a little deep. But in any given year, I typically do publish takes on talent across the top three or four rounds, and retain that work, so I definitely have at least first round recommendations going back quite awhile.
Now, most prospects fail in a game of failure. I’m inevitably going to have some poor takes each year. But on balance, I’m pretty satisfied with my early round analysis over the past decade. Here is the Angels #1 pick vs the top (available) guy on my board going back ten years:
| Year | Angels Selection | Top of Turk’s Board |
| 2016 | Matt Thaiss | Byran Reynolds |
| 2017 | Jo Adell | Jo Adell |
| 2018 | Jordyn Adams | Brady Singer |
| 2019 | Will Wilson | George Kirby |
| 2020 | Reid Detmers | Reid Detmers |
| 2021 | Sam Bachman | Kumar Rocker |
| 2022 | Zach Neto | Zach Neto |
| 2023 | Nolan Schanuel | Matt Shaw |
| 2024 | Christian Moore | Cam Smith |
| 2025 | Tyler Bremner | Kade Anderson |
The first thing to note is that all ten of my first round picks have made it to the MLB. And in only two cases (2021, 2023) have the Angels’ selections outperformed my pick to date, and both of those are very recent cases. Matt Shaw was drafted only two years ago, has played roughly sixty MLB games, and I don’t think his story is finished yet. His power has not yet emerged in the MLB, but the underlying pitch selection metrics are good, as is the glove. I don’t think his story has been written yet.
And Rocker in 2021 was the clear BPA, but also came with shady medicals and big bonus demands that were accessible only to MLB executives – I might have turned my nose up as well just like the Mets did, and opted for one of my second picks (Michael McGreevy and Jordan Wicks, according to my spreadsheet). But on the whole, most of the 2021 first round class has been pretty underwhelming to date – especially at the top.
Three times in the past ten years, my own selection intersected with that of the Angels. In 2017 in particular, Griffin Canning was next on my board after Jo Adell, so that was a particularly exciting draft. Even despite development issues for both, I would draft Adell and Detmers over again. They were rational, high-value selections worthy of their slots, and they may finally be hitting their strides.
2016 was a very fortunate year for my boards. Not only was Bryan Reynolds my top pick, despite sliding all the way to the Giants in the second round, my 2nd and 3rd round picks were Akil Baddoo and Corbin Burnes. Now, Baddoo has had an up and down career (he started really hot and faded into his mid-20s), but the addition of Bryan Reynolds and Corbin Burnes would have been franchise-transforming with almost 40 cumulative WAR between them.
But these are past receipts. What about the present – how might this draft have gone down had we followed the choice architecture set by my own boards and any BPAs (“best player available”) who might have fallen further than anyone expected?
DAY ONE
Note that last bit on BPAs – because it’s important in this draft year.
There were players expected to go in the first or CBA A round that fell to rounds 2-4 this year in very surprising ways. That happens to some extent every year, but there was an accumulation of talent available to the Angels at each of their first five selection points that really had my eyes bugging.
| Pick | Angels Selection | Turk’s Board | Consensus BPA | Final Pick |
| #2 | Tyler Bremner | Kade Anderson | Ethan Holliday | Kade Anderson |
| #47 | Chase Shores | Quentin Young | Devin Taylor | Quentin Young |
| #79 | Johnny Slawinski | Taitn Gray | Anthony Eyanson | Anthony Eyanson |
| #105 | Nate Snead | Gavin Turley | Mason Neville | Mason Neville |
The Angels had four selections on Day One, and the table above lays out how my board compared to theirs, alongside what I viewed as the industry consensus (basically an average of rankings across 7-8 sources) of the best player remaining at that point. The very rightmost column is a “final” decision on the ultimate pick in my shadow draft, including cases where the BPA was too tantalizing to pass up.
I don’t think I need to belabor the first selection. Those who joined me in the draft open threads know I was neither overly shocked or overly disappointed with the Tyler Bremner selection. I was surprised that the Angels had their pick of the consensus BPA in Holliday and all the top pitchers, but also was relieved that they didn’t pick Ike Irish, and think that Bremner is probably the talent equivalent to Arnold and Witherspoon, and less boom/bust than Doyle and Hernandez. I could have gotten behind Holliday or Parker as well, but Kade Anderson was my guy all the way.
#47 was the first real shock. Not only did the Angels take the route I parodied in my series (I literally said that I bet Minasian had the 47 pitch Chase Shores compilation on infinite repeat in his office!), but the amount of talent they passed up with the second pick was breathtaking. Very few believed any of Devin Taylor, Alex Lodise, Mason Neville, or Anthony Eyanson would be on the board. These were top college performers who were expected to go off at picks 25-45 as a group. And meanwhile, the guy I was fixing on all spring – thought to be coveted by the Dodgers, Mets or Orioles – was still there for the taking. Quentin Young, with the 80 grade power and 40 grade hit tool, ready to blast or bust in Arizona or the Cal League this fall.
Really, any of the options listed above would have been fantastic choices. It makes a ton of sense that Oakland picked up Devin Taylor immediately after the Angels passed him up. While his glove might Soler-esque, that bat has few holes – the underlying metrics and the long-term performance suggest a middle of the order threat, not far from the MLB. (In fact, the whole Oakland draft – outside of the first round they picked immediately after the Angels in each round – adopted a hyperrational BPA approach that is a good contrast to both my selections and the Angels’).
It also would have been tough to pass up Anthony Eyanson, Kade Anderson’s LSU rotation mate, at the same point. But I had cathected so long and so forcefully to the SoCal masher’s upside, and had also just drafted for polish and safety at #2, I decide to reel in Quentin Young, as the ultimate upside play. 3B/RF – basically a chance to draft Holliday and Anderson together, if you buy that Holliday and Young have equal upside, and similar issues with contact and zone coverage (they do).
But guess what – and who woulda thought – in round 3, we’d have the chance to draft Eyanson all over again!
By #79, a large number of my top 5 round targets are already off the board. Mitch Voit, Ethan Hedges, Murf Gray, Aaron Walton, Michael Lombardi, Cade Obermueller, Joseph Dzierwa.
Pity, but I’m actually feeling pretty good about this, in that I found a lot of players ranked to rounds 3-6, and promoted them higher in my own lists, and other teams valued them highly as well. Validation that I wasn’t going out on a limb with a guy like Voit or Hedges – data-driven teams were seeing what I was seeing below the surface, and nabbed them well before industry rankings suggested they might go.
But still, looking at my Round 3 board, all of my top three guys are still there. Each of them power-oriented outfielders, with prep thunderstick Taitn Gray leading the way (Gavin Turley and James Quinn-Irons behind him).
This is a tough one, because surprise of surprises, Anthony Eyanson, Baseball America’s #32 ranked player, is also still there, just ready for the plucking. In this case, going with the BPA at pick #79 feels unavoidable. As much as I’d love to invest in two risky prep power bats with 35+ HR potential, I’m simply going to be satisfied that I got Quentin, and now fish in Eyanson, keeping the LSU championship 1-2 pitching tandem together for the long haul.
But now that I’ve bagged two mid-rotation arms and a big prep lotto ticket, I’m feeling like I need to bring in some collegiate positional talent with my compensation pick after round three. (And likely my round four pick as well.) And lucky for me, the two guys I passed up in round three, Turley and JQI, are still available!
(At this point in my shadow draft, I can see that the divergence between what I want and what Perry and Tim want is significant and definitive, so I’m in a fantasy of my own design – but suffer my alternative timeline for a little longer here.)
Approaching the final Day One selection at #105, my two fave OF bats are still beckoning me across the river, but who do I see right beside them, just kicking up his heels and casting a line for some trout? The D1 collegiate home run leader, Mason Neville. (MLB’s #35 ranked prospect!)
Now, there are questions about Neville’s hit tool, and whether his power game was mostly suited to Oregon’s PK Park, but c’mon. The power upside is formidable, and it’s coming from centerfield. When I sit Neville, Turley and JQI side by side, the choice is clear. I’m picking the BPA again.
So if you’re still following along, I’ve just drafted Kade Anderson, Quentin Young, Anthony Eyanson, Mason Neville. All four are Top 40 (ie, first round) talents on MLB’s board. All four satisfy immediate needs in the Angels’ system. The convergence between BPA and org fit is impeccable, formidable, and…unexpected. And it’s a diversified portfolio – two pitchers, and infielder, an outfielder, prep and college both.
DAY TWO
At this point in the draft, I think anything that comes next is frosting. Getting four first rounders through round three is an A+ draft in any estimation. The rest is for fun.
And fun is what I get, because my next pick comes only four slots after my last one, and both my also-ran outfielders are still there.
At this point in the draft, BPA becomes a bit dicier. We’re past the top 100, and some of the remaining names are prep kids with huge bonus demands (eg, Briggs McKenzie, who later nabs a $3M bonus); collegiates who haven’t been scooped yet might have medical or makeup issues. So here in the torso of the draft, you might begin to look sideways at guys that have fallen far, and just pick your stocks as you see fit.
In this case, I’m weighing Turley and Quinn-Irons, and I like them both.
I know I’m going to get my heart broken leaving one on the table, so I try to marry reason with pleasure here, and pick Quinn-Irons. I just selected one lefty Oregonian in Mason Neville, and Turley is another, most likely with a corner OF only profile, likely left field. But James Quinn-Irons is a strapping righty at 6’5”, and can play all OF positions with a non-trivial chance at sticking in center. The small school resume adds considerable risk to his projection, but Neville and Turley have hit tool risk as well. So I’m going with handedness and athleticism as the tiebreaker.
Welcome to Anaheim, JQI!
There’s a bit more risk here in drafting three power-over-hit archetypes in Young, Neville and Quinn-Irons, but if one catches fire along with the stable pitching prospects Anderson and Eyanson, it’d be a very successful return.
The rest of my top ten rounds looks like so:
| Pick | Angels Selection | Turk’s Board | Consensus BPA | Final Pick |
| #109 | Jake Munroe | Gavin Turley, James Quinn-Irons | Gavin Turley, Briggs McKenzie | James Quinn-Irons |
| #140 | CJ Gray | Matt Barr | Korbyn Dickerson | Matt Barr |
| #169 | Luke Lacourse | Jacob Parker, Grant Jay | Daniel Dickinson, Josiah Hartshorn | Grant Jay |
| #199 | Lucas Mahlstedt | Bobby Boser, Kerrington Cross | Nick Dumesnil, Jared Spencer | Bobby Boser |
| #229 | Isaiah Jackson | Cardell Thibodeaux | Nick Dumesnil, Jared Spencer | Cardell Thibodeaux |
| #259 | Slate Alford | Harrison Bodendorf, Blake Gillespie | Jared Jones | Blake Gillespie |
| #289 | Nick Rodriguez | Harrison Bodendorf | Maximus Martin | Harrison Bodendorf |
In round 5, I do actually like the Angels’ real-world selection. CJ Gray showed monster stuff at the Combine, just like my guy here, Matt Barr, did. Both are younger (prep vs JuCo) upside plays. Barr is a spin unicorn, while Gray has premium velocity and a promising changeup. Gray was on my radar, but I think Barr will be more affordable, and I stick with my script. He was the #1 target in that round on my board.
In rounds 6-10, we’re beginning to pivot to the senior sign world, and selections are largely a matter of stock picking and roster diversification. While I’m surprised that guys like Dumesnil, Martin and Jones are sticking around as long as they are (especially Maximus Martin – should I grab him?), I’m going after the guys I brought to the board here. Each of my subsequent selections were in the top 7 rounds on my initial boards, so I’m getting a lot of players I like early.
Bobby Boser is my variant on Slate Alford (also a 9th round target on my boards – I liked that Angels sign) – a 3B speed/power guy with some infield utility flexibility a la Ethan Hedges and Voit. I was surprised that C/OF Grant Jay fell to the 12th round – yes, there are long-term defensive questions, but he has significant power, and I like the idea of reuniting Ryan Johnson with his Dallas Baptist battery mate.
Meanwhile I’ve waxed aplenty about my “fun” pick Cardell Thibodeaux, and here he is in the 8th round – my version of a dynamic CF grinder, much like the Isaiah Jackson pick that the Angels nabbed in the same round. I complete the top ten with two standout college starters who were regular features in Baseball America’s weekly ace report this season.
In general, I don’t have too many complaints with what the Angels did in rounds 7-10. This is the zone where it makes sense to pick up a durable reliever like Mahlstedt, and the team filled in some organizational holes with college performers who competed down the stretch.
ROUNDS 11-20
At this point, I’m feeling pretty good about our pitching haul. Five viable starter candidates, including a young upside guy who probably slots in at Low-A in Barr, and four other guys that will slot in at High-A and AA by spring of 2026.
There’s a trio of outfielders with positional flexibility, a catcher that has a history of playing a utility role, and two left-infield guys of different ages to challenge for the hot corner. It would have been nice to acquire a bit more mid-infield depth, but up-the-middle is arguably one of the few areas that there’s a wee bit of positional depth on the Angels farm, comparatively.
I’ve also been pretty budget-efficient at this point. There are few selections that I’ve made that require overslot commitments – maybe Young and Barr – and several where I’m likely to achieve some pool savings (including with Kade at top). I think I may have in excess of $2M in savings at this point, so the first thing I’m doing before Round 11 is reaching out to the prep OF agent of Jacob Parker to see if he’s signable at $2M+ or thereabouts. If so, I grab him, and if no, I grab collegiate data darling Jack Moroknek, hunting for comparable power in an elder talent. (The Nats would end up scooping Moroknek in the same round, two picks later, so I wasn’t the only one with this idea.)
The rest of my “Day 3” round-up is basically a list of names I showcased in my draft series. Three more pitchers, three infield college performers, three more OFs, and Oregon’s big cleanup hitter Walsh, who joins former teammate Mason Neville at High-A shortly after drafting.
| 319 | Jack Moroknek (or Jacob Parker) |
| 349 | Jay Woolfolk |
| 379 | Jacob Walsh |
| 409 | Kaleb Freeman |
| 439 | Brayden Simpson |
| 469 | Eddie King Jr |
| 499 | Bryce Hughes |
| 529 | Zac Cowan |
| 559 | Colton Cosper |
| 589 | Jonathan Hogart |
It’s a college-rich group – more so than a typical draft – and maybe a tell that this is basically fan fictuin. But given MiLB contraction and the decimated state of positional talent across the four full-season affiliates, I’m biasing toward more developed players in 2025, filling in gaps that are big and self-evident, in hopes of graduating useful players in the next 2-3 years, and leaning on Latin recruitment to replenish the developmental leagues.
And there’s more collegiates where these came from, with a large pool of talented UDFAs still available post-draft. Guys like Logan Maxwell and Robbie Burnett (both ultimately signed by the Yankees), and Ryland Zaborowski (who the Angels actually did sign) were names featured in my series, and all seem worth a flyer at $150k a sign.
In Summary
So here my shadow draft is complete – and I’m surprised and delighted that my actual haul reflects in large part what I was targeting at the outset. It represents the depth of this year’s class, and the strength of the Angels’ draft position – but it also deviates utterly from the strategy that Minasian’s team actually pursued.
Minasain and McIlvaine conjured a highly unorthodox draft strategy with a number of long odds bets and a very long time horizon. The impacts of this Angels draft are unlikely to be fully felt until 2030, given the amount of project arms in the class. Perhaps some of the young arms may become trade capital in 2027-28 if we see successes emerge from the Arizona pitching lab. But given the elimination of short season leagues (eg, Orem, Burlington), we’re unlikely to see any of the prep arms in game action for another eight months, as AZL action is already coming to a close this week.
In the meantime, there’s Bremner and the bullpen wildcats to follow. And if that proves slim pickings, we can always check into some of the names in my shadow draft, and see how these Toothsome Angels fare in their alternative timeline.
Hopefully it’s a more benevolent multiverse than we’ve experienced in cineplexes with recent Disney IP, and brings us (if only fictionally) closer to the last time a (Disney-owned) team sniffed a championship.
