2019 MLB Draft: Halos Heaven Consensus Big Board

The 2019 MLB Draft begins a week from Memorial Day, Monday, June 3rd, at 4pm Pacific. Reprising a grand old Halos Heaven tradition begun in 2014, we bring you the Halos Heaven Big Board, our pseudo-scientific attempt to bring you a stack-ranked list of the top talent available from the high school and collegiate ranks in this year’s draft. See a sample of previous years here: 2015, 2016, 2017.

Version 1.0 of the Board is a weighted average drawn from 12 sources, including the talent rankings of Baseball America, ESPN, MLB and Fangraphs, plus eight mock drafts from the likes of Law, Mayo, Callis, Ellis, CBS, FG, BA, et al. These are the gents that sweat the radar guns, squint at video, and boogie with crosscheckers across the Americas. As we are averaging a combination of pure talent rankings and predictive mocks, you can get a sense of the zones of possibility around the Angels’ first three picks (#15, 55, 92), and let reasonable conversations begin about whether the team has seized an opportunity or let one slip by once the names are called in. We’ll update the list the weekend prior to the Draft in order to reflect final public mocks.

As we say every year, these aren’t our predictions! It’s an attempt to synthesize the “best player available” (more thoughts on that here) from a chorus of experts, and a way to follow along as 30 organizational strategies play out in real time. There are always names that slide down the board at the last moment (hello Sean Newcomb! hello Griffin Canning!), as some teams work out deals with young players ahead of time, and front offices are aware of bonus demands and medical reports that the average fan is not.

A few thoughts follow below the board, but give it a look over and let’s chat in the comment thread about where Matt Swanson, Billy Eppler and team might take the organization this June.

The fun part of this version of the Big Board is that it resulted in a rather uncanny outcome. If the Angels were to follow this board to a tee, and each of the names at their selection slots are available when the Adam Kennedy comes to the podium, the Angels would take the top prep pitcher in the draft class (Matthew Allen), alongside two polished college players from Los Angeles – UCLA’s best starting pitcher and their best position player.

Matthew Allen is the name most frequently associated with the Angels in the first round among the sources that went into this consensus estimate. He’s a big arm with big fastball, a frontline ceiling and three plus pitches. Choosing a prep arm with the first selection generally makes me nervous AF, but this draft features one of the weakest college pitching crops in the past couple decades, so pickings may be thin by the time the Angels select mid-round. Following up a boom-or-bust pick with more high-probability (ie, “advanced”) talent in rounds two and three would be a good hedge against catastrophe, in that case.

UCLA has a lot to hang its hat on when it comes to pitching, between alumni like Gerrit Cole, Trevor Bauer and Griffin Canning. Ryan Garcia does not have the ceilings of those names, but he has four league-average pitches and command over them to suggest a fast-moving starter with #3/4 upside. Michael Toglia, meanwhile, is a big switch-hitting power bat with a record of performance and the ability to play both corner OF and 1b, but whose streakiness and swing-and-miss tendencies have pushed him into the 2nd/3rd round territory, despite good upside.

Of course, there’s no reason to believe that the draft will play out like take one of the Board suggests, and we’ll have additional postings to discuss how different scenarios might unfold. But on first approach, this outcome would cover the three bases this team really needs to touch in this draft: high-ceiling pitching with frontline potential, high-probability pitching that can move fast and fill out the middle/back of a rotation, and bats with significant power potential, ideally on the infield corners. The Angels farm is thin in each of these areas, and there are names above that can fill some gaps.

Here we go!