Assessing the Yankees’ two picks on Day 1 of the 2024 MLB Draft (2024)

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?”

This would be a fair question to ask in the 2010 MLB Draft, as I just noted. But I urge you to consider how player analysis goes deeper than mere college ERA. You see, Hess has unteachable skills that the Yankees feel they can better harness. What are those tools, you ask?

Hess combines quantity in his arsenal with quality. He starts at hitters with a four-seamer that sits 95-97 and can top out at 99. The pitch has huge bore through the zone, but he leaned on it too much when he got behind in counts and became predictable. So while the pitch is above average in a vacuum, it was an average offering in practice. He complements that heater with two breaking pitches: a slider that flashes above-average and a disgusting, nasty 12-6 curveball that has huge shape and gets both chases out of the zone and whiffs in the zone. Per Baseball America, Hess’s curveball generated a whopping 58-percent whiff rate: among the best of not just any curveball, but any individual offering in Division I baseball. It’s his bread-and-butter pitch; a double-plus offering. He finishes off his repertoire with an above-average changeup with two-plane movement and good velocity separation from his fastball. What’s more, he shows a feel to locate each of his offerings in optimal parts of the strike zone.

This is where the analysis becomes tricky because I just described a pitcher who should’ve dominated college baseball — SEC or not. When a player struggles with this loud of stuff, it usually means one of two things is occurring: the pitcher completely lost feel for the zone, or his sequencing is a mess. In the case of Hess, he showed little understanding of how to sequence to keep hitters on edge given his tantalizing stuff.

The example I used above with his fastball encapsulates this issue. Here’s another way to put it: Hess has shown an ability to throw his nasty curveball for a strike, so why not mix that in more when you’re down 2-1 or 3-1? By throwing his fastball as much as he did when behind, he gave hitters fewer factors to consider. As he got touched up, he lost confidence in his ability to get outs, and his strike-throwing regressed as the outings went on: that screams a mental hurdle, not a physical one. This is just one example of poor sequencing and the effect it had on his command, but there are additional examples of poor sequencing that other evaluators I respect have alluded to.

I have made this point in prior writings, but this pick implies heavy collaboration between the amateur scouting and player development departments. I believe the Yankees see a guy with a tantalizing physical skillset that doesn’t require much tinkering, but rather getting him comfortable throwing any pitch in any situation. That’s a much easier hurdle to overcome than having to put someone in a pitching lab to rework their slider grip or optimize their stride to the plate to generate better, consistent velocity. His medicals may be a factor as well, but as pitchers like Lucas Giolito and Clarke Schmidt have demonstrated, that’s not a death knell to a future big-league career.

From a sheer stuff perspective, there’s little doubt in my mind that Hess is a first-round-caliber talent.

The nice thing is that even though the Yankees may look at Hess as a first-round talent, they likely won’t have to pay him as one. The $3,332,900 value of the 23rd pick, paired with Hess’s likely bonus demands, means the Yankees are likely to have more money to utilize later in the draft.

Remember, the first 10 rounds worth of picks come with a predetermined slot value. Teams don’t have to sign players to the exact slot value at which they were taken, but the collective amount (the “bonus pool”) cannot exceed without harsh financial repercussions. The Yankees are potentially honing in on several prospects—likely prep players who can threaten to go to college—who they feel are first-round talents but have higher bonus demands. Interestingly, they didn’t go that route with their next pick last night.

That’s because with the 53rd overall pick, the Yankees selected Vanderbilt’s Bryce Cunningham, another 6-foot-5 right-handed pitcher. For starters (no pun intended), Cunningham’s fastball sits in the mid-90s but is pretty straight, so it plays down from its velocity band. His best offering is a high-spin changeup that dives late, tunneling well with his fastball. He leverages a gyro slider that sits in the mid-80s, and it was the secondary offering he leaned on most often. While his command is fine, it waned the deeper he got into his season at Vanderbilt. That’s understandable, though, as he entered this season as a converted reliever and reached unchartered heights in his workload.

There are a couple of factors I think the Yankees are looking at as potential avenues for development. The scouting team over at FanGraphs, which I respect, made a point about the tilt of his release point on his fastball and how it isn’t conducive to life up in the zone. I largely agree with that point and wonder if he’ll enter the Yankees’ pitching lab and work on creating more supination on his release to create that desired carry. I also think they’ll get him to start throwing his change more than his slider unless they also tinker with his slider and make it a better offering as well. I generally believe it’s easier to develop sliders than changeups, and there are countless examples of pitchers in the organization taking significant strides with their sliders (Will Warren, Chase Hampton, Zach Messinger, and Cam Schlittler to name a few).

To conclude, the Yankees selected two pitchers who underperformed based on the qualities of their arsenal. Be it sequence adjustments or pitch grip alterations, there are feasible paths for both these players to see their prospect stock increase. Hess in particular has a real chance to become a legitimate pitching prospect, with Cunningham potentially becoming a fourth starter-type should he make the adjustments I alluded to.

Although this isn’t the answer that you might’ve wanted today, it’s imperative to see how the rest of the draft plays out to give these picks grades. A great deal of how these selections will be graded depends on who the Yankees will use their saved bonus money on, likely in the third or fourth rounds. Later this week, I’ll have a piece succinctly (famous last words) recapping other players the Yankees selected in the draft.