Griffey, Hunter kids highlight Day 3 picks

June 11th, 2016

On Saturday afternoon, 13 rounds into Day 3 of the 2016 First-Year Player Draft, Torii Hunter's voice crackled over the telephone lines. The Angels had enlisted his help to announce their 23rd-round selection: Torii Hunter Jr., son of the fan favorite and two-time All-Star in Anaheim.
A round later, the Mariners drafted an Arizona redshirt senior, a wide receiver for the football team who hadn't played baseball since he was a kid. It was Trey Griffey, son of franchise legend Ken Griffey Jr. The Kid, of course, wore No. 24 with the Mariners. The Mariners drafted Trey in the 24th round.

Those picks were just two of the most notable from the third and final day of the Draft. After 316 players were selected on Thursday and Friday in the opening 10 rounds, hundreds more amateur athletes got a shot at the pros in the last and largest group of rounds, 11 through 40.
Texas A&M University had 13 players selected, the most in the Draft, while the University of Southern California had 12 players selected. Mississippi State University and Oklahoma State University each produced 11 players, while Texas Tech University had 10 players taken. Three schools produced eight players, including Louisiana State University, the University of Florida and the University of Louisville.
Players were selected from 45 states, and the states that had the most players selected were California (203), Florida (114), Texas (113), Georgia (61), Illinois (57), New York (39), New Jersey (36), Washington (35), North Carolina (34) and Tennessee (30).
Here's a look at some of the highlights from Day 3:
:: Complete 2016 Draft coverage ::
Rounds 11-20
Like Days 1 and 2, Day 3 of the Draft started college-heavy, as teams looked to balance players' talent with their likelihood of signing. The rules for signing bonuses in Rounds 11-40 are a little different than the first 10 rounds. Players drafted from Round 11 on can sign for up to $100,000 and it will not count against the club's signing bonus allocation for the first 10 rounds. However, every dollar above $100,000 counts against the bonus pool.
When the 11th round began, seven college players within MLBPipeline.com's Top 200 prospect rankings were still available. By the time the 20th round concluded, all but one were off the board.
The White Sox took the first of those players in the 11th round -- right-hander Ian Hamilton of Washington State, ranked No. 187 on MLB Pipeline's list. The Angels took the next one later in the same round, 168th-rated Brennon Lund, a center fielder from Brigham Young.

The Brewers grabbed the highest-rated college prospect available in the 12th round when they selected Oregon State shortstop Trever Morrison, MLB Pipeline's No. 116 prospect. The Padres selected Louisiana State right-hander Jared Poche, ranked No. 160, in the 14th round, and the Reds took 172nd-ranked TCU right-hander Mitchell Traver in the 17th.
The sixth Top 200 college player of the seven came off the board in the 20th round, when the A's took Texas A&M right-hander Brigham Hill, rated the No. 130 Draft prospect. But Hill is a Draft-eligible sophomore, so he could elect to return to school for another year.
The top 10 overall prospects entering Day 3 of the Draft were all high school players, and in Rounds 11-20, only three were taken -- Jared Horn by the Brewers, Zach Linginfelter by the Yankees and Nick Quintana by the Red Sox.
Horn was the highest-rated prospect, a Californian right-hander ranked No. 34 by MLB Pipeline. A potential first-round pick, he fell all the way to the 20th round, 591st overall. At this point, Horn, a California commit, seems likely to attend college rather than sign for a lower-round value.

Another notable pick was Jacob Heyward, an outfielder from the University of Miami and the younger brother of Cubs outfielder Jason Heyward, going to the Giants in the 18th round.
One feel-good story early in Day 3 was the Tigers drafting Clemson right-hander Clate Schmidt in the 20th round, 595th overall. Schmidt was diagnosed with Stage 2 nodular sclerosis Hodgkin lymphoma, and he returned to pitch this season after the cancer went into remission.
Rounds 21-30
It was in the second group of rounds on Saturday that the major legacy picks came in. First was Hunter representing the Angels to select his son 696th overall as a center fielder out of Notre Dame. Then it was the Mariners selecting the most junior Griffey 21 picks later, 717th overall.
Both Hunter Jr. and Griffey are excellent athletes who have focused their collegiate athletics on football, not baseball. Hunter played baseball for Notre Dame but has only 12 at-bats for the Irish, 11 this season. And Griffey hasn't played baseball at all for Arizona. But given what Torii Hunter Sr. and Ken Griffey Jr. meant to their franchises, the Angels and Mariners drafting their sons wasn't surprising in the least.

As far as the top remaining available prospects, only one more of the Top 10 entering Day 3 came off the board in this portion of the Draft: Cooper Johnson, a high-school catcher out of Illinois who was ranked 68th overall on MLB Pipeline's Top 200 prospect list.
By now, if a highly-rated high-school player is drafted, he is probably unlikely to sign. The Reds took a flyer on Johnson, one of the better defensive high school catching prospects in recent years, in the 28th round, but he will likely go on to play college ball at Mississippi.

Other high-potential prospects taken here, who also might end up not signable include right-hander Will Crowe, drafted in the 21st round by the Indians; shortstop Grae Kessinger, selected by the Padres in the 26th; and shortstops Cam Shepherd and Tyler Fitzgerald, taken by the Red Sox in the 29th and 30th rounds.
Some of the prospects drafted were high schoolers who performed well in tournaments and showcases over the summer but whose stocks dropped following lackluster springs. Those include players like Padres 24th-round pick Hunter Bishop, Astros 26th-round pick Avery Tuck and Orioles 27th-round pick Daniel Bakst.
The Mets made a pair of interesting picks in the 27th and 28th round, dipping into the youngest end of the prospect pool to draft two straight 16-year-olds. With their 27th-round pick, they took Joel Urena, a left-hander from Georgia Luperon High School for Math and Science born on Aug. 17, 1999. In the next round, they drafted right-hander William Sierra out of Edouard Montpetit High School, born nine days after Urena on Aug. 26.
Rounds 31-40
The final 10 rounds of the Draft, as the end of Day 3 often does, featured a mix of good-faith gestures, legacy picks and franchises taking long-shots on the potential upper-round picks that had slid out of reasonable signability range.
In the 34th round, the D-backs brought in Corey Hahn to announce the annual pick they've named after him. When Hahn was a freshman on the Arizona State baseball team, a headfirst slide left him paralyzed. He wore No. 34 as a player. The D-backs drafted him in the 34th round in 2013, and Hahn subsequently went to work in the team's scouting department.
On Saturday, he made the "Corey Hahn 34th pick" -- Connor Owings, brother of current D-backs utility player Chris Owings.
As Day 3 drew to a close, the scattered prospects still left who had entered the Draft ranked inside MLB Pipeline's top 100 were all taken. The Tigers took high school third baseman Drew Mendoza, the highest-ranked player remaining at 36th overall, in the 36th round. Mendoza was a potential first-rounder, but he would have required a steep price tag to sign and has a strong commitment to Florida State.
The last top-100 player, right-hander Ryan Zeferjahn -- a Kansas prep thrower like No. 4 overall pick Riley Pint -- was selected by the Rays in the 37th round.
When all was said and done, only four of the Top 200 Draft prospects had gone undrafted, and they were all prep players with major Division I program commitments. Those four, all pitchers, were right-hander Ray Gaither, who is committed to Dallas Baptist; left-hander Erik Miller, committed to Stanford; right-hander Charles King, committed to Texas Christian; and right-hander Alek Manoah, committed to West Virginia.
And, of course, there was the final overall pick. With it, the Cardinals selected a high-school center fielder, Jeremy Ydens, concluding the Draft after 40 rounds and 1,216 selections.