Armed with No. 2 overall pick, Rays licking their chops before Draft

ST. PETERSBURG -- When the MLB Draft Lottery broke in the Rays’ favor at the Winter Meetings last December, rewarding them with the No. 2 overall pick, amateur scouting director Chuck Ricci said his phone “blew up” with messages.

Picking that high is a rare and important opportunity for the Rays -- a “pleasant surprise,” as Ricci put it -- and the corresponding bump in the club’s Draft bonus pool is just as valuable. The news obviously generated a lot of excitement and anticipation within the organization, so Ricci sent the club’s staff a message of his own the next day.

“This doesn’t change us. This doesn’t put any more pressure on us,” Ricci said. “We’ve got a really good process in place, and we’re in really good shape.”

Of course, some things are different when you have the second pick in the Draft.

The Rays have been evaluating the kind of prospects they haven’t had access to in a long time. Their last Top-10 pick was in 2017, when they selected Brendan McKay fourth overall. Whichever name they call on Saturday, it will be their highest choice since their back-to-back No. 1 overall picks in 2007 (David Price) and ’08 (Tim Beckham).

It’s a good place for the Rays to be, especially with this year’s Draft class featuring a top tier of three players: shortstops Grady Emerson and Roch Cholowsky and catcher Vahn Lackey. The White Sox will make the top pick, then the Rays will be on the clock with at least two of those players still available.

“Have we met with some guys that we maybe wouldn’t have met with? Absolutely,” Ricci said. “But I really trust the process and the work our people put in, and we’re in a really good position -- not just for [No.] 2, but for the other 20 picks as well.”

• Day 1 picks: 2, 33, 49, 85, 113
• Bonus pool allotment: $19,009,300
• Last year’s top pick: Daniel Pierce, SS, No. 14 overall … Regarded as a solid all-around player in high school, and someone who was likely to get the most out of his abilities given his work ethic and feel for the game, Pierce has shown flashes of his first-round talent while playing around injuries in Single-A Charleston. He’s looked like an impactful defender at shortstop, although his offensive profile -- less contact, more power -- was the opposite of what he showed as an amateur.
• Breakout 2025 pick: Taitn Gray, 1B, No. 86 overall … Gray is also currently on the injured list, but what he showed in the early stages of his professional debut turned a lot of heads. He’s now a first baseman, not a catcher. But the switch-hitting masher has shown incredible raw power from both sides of the plate that’ll play at any position. He was also impressively disciplined in his approach as he hit .286/.406/.474 with six homers, 30 RBIs, 31 walks and 42 strikeouts in his first 46 games for Charleston.

Ricci said last week the Rays have begun discussions about what they’ll do with the No. 2 pick, but they don’t want to “pinhole” themselves into one player and lose the ability to adjust on the fly.

With three of the first 49 picks, the Rays have the second-largest bonus pool in the Draft. The No. 2 pick alone comes with an assigned slot value of $10,507,000, which is more than the entire pool for 13 teams. The 33rd pick, which came from the Orioles in the Shane Baz trade, has an assigned value of $2,970,200, and No. 49 is slotted at $2,033,400.

That should create more paths to acquire talent, and they have spent plenty of time deliberating how to make the most out of that capacity to spend on this year’s class. That could mean spending big early and saving later, or vice versa.

“Everyone thinks it’s just the pick, but the Draft equity with the pool money and how to use that really creates a lot of flexibility,” Ricci said.

With that in mind, the Rays have stuck to the process they’ve refined over the past few years.

They interviewed 90 players during the recent Draft Combine. They held five pre-Draft workouts, and they have continued to incorporate the opinions of scouts and officials from all levels of the organization -- hitting and pitching coordinators, video analysts, player development staff, performance science specialists and more -- as they evaluate their prospective picks.

“Leading into the meetings when we found out we had the second pick, I felt we were in really good shape picking anywhere,” Ricci said.

Leading up to Day 1, Ricci said they’ll “walk through every possible scenario,” noting that the Draft can speed up quickly if you’re not prepared. What the White Sox do with the top pick could affect them, but they’ll be ready for anything.

Will that lead them to Emerson, a skilled high school shortstop and MLB Pipeline’s top Draft prospect? Or Cholowsky, the polished UCLA shortstop ranked just behind him? What about Lackey, the athletic catcher with rare offensive upside at the position? Or could it be someone outside that group?

“As I’ve told a lot of people recently, I don’t know how this is going to go. There’s some really good options,” Ricci said last week. “I can tell you that we are going to be spending every penny of that [pool] money, because that’s the way we get better.

“The main avenue to acquire talent is through the Draft. We’ve always been very aggressive, and we’ll continue to do so.”