PG CROSSCHECKER COLUMN
By David Rawnsley
January 24, 2008

Twenty-Year Retrospective: Astros to PG

The 2008 draft will mark my 20^th year with this wonderful and sometimes all-consuming event that shapes the lives of so many players and the directions of so many teams.

During the 20 years, I’ve experienced the draft from a number of different roles. The first nine years were helping coordinate the Houston Astros drafts … and there is nothing quite like actually being at the microphone and making selections for your organization. Since then, I’ve seen the draft though the perspective of a journalist/scout with Baseball America, Rivals.com and Perfect Game, as an agent/advisor with Tommy Tanzer and Sosnick/Cobbe Sports and the last three years as an analyst with MLB.com and ESPN.

Aside from thinking that 20 years is a long time to be focusing on any one thing, marking the occasion got me to thinking about some of my strongest baseball memories that center around the draft. Here are 10 that stand out, broken into three parts but not in any sort of order or priority.

First Pick in the Draft, 1992

I feel for R.J. Harrison, the Tampa Bay Rays fine scouting director who has gone through the experience of being with the team holding the No. 1 overall pick on many occasions, including back-to-back drafts in 2007 and 2008. Having that selection has an aura of importance about it that makes it seem to take priority over everything else the scouting staff is doing.

Evaluating who is the best player in the country is one issue; fitting that pick into signability concerns is quite another. In 1992, when Houston had the first pick, the club was for sale and GM Bill Wood was told by then-owner John McMullen that he had $700,000 to sign the first player—and don’t ask for any more and get it done before the draft! That was a tall order in a draft that didn’t have an obvious top talent and also had a slot for the No. 1 pick that was above that dollar amount. A year earlier, the Yankees had established a precedent by signing the No. 1 pick, lefthander Brien Taylor, for $1.55 million.

As the spring scouting season wore its course, the four players on the Astros preferred list were Cal State Fullerton third baseman Phil Nevin, Michigan high school shortstop Derek Jeter, Central Florida outfielder Chad Mottola and Stanford outfielder Jeff Hammonds. Of those four, the toolsy Mottola was the clear last choice, while the other three were hard to separate.

It’s easy to look back now and wonder why Jeter wasn’t the top guy. But in 1992, high school players just weren’t as thoroughly evaluated as they are now and a player from Michigan even less so. The Astros scout in Michigan, Hall of Fame southpaw Hal Newhouser, was so adamant that the Astros should pick Jeter that he eventually retired from scouting when Jeter wasn’t chosen.

But two factors led to the Astros passing on the future Hall of Famer. First, he indicated he would not sign for $700,000, or anything close to that amount. Second, we just didn’t have the depth of scouting information to put him ahead of three more established college players.

In hindsight, think about what the addition of Jeter to the near-miss Astros teams of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s that included Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell in the infield would have meant to Houston.

It was evident all spring that Hammonds was the consensus top player in the 1992 draft, but he also had no interest whatsoever in playing for Houston. He effectively rigged his signability so that he would slide to the Baltimore Orioles, the team nearest his New Jersey home. The Orioles had the fourth pick and eventually signed Hammonds for $975,000, the largest bonus paid out that year.

Through Southern California area scout Ross Sapp, the Astros had an outstanding relationship with Nevin, that year’s college player of the year, that went back to high school. In the end, that’s the player the Astros selected.

The most important factor in Nevin becoming the No. 1 pick in the 1992 draft was that he and his agent, Michael Watkins, agreed to say yes to the $700,000 figure that the Astros offered the night before the draft.

Jeter ended up going sixth overall to the Yankees, his favorite team. Interestingly, he signed for the same $700,000 bonus the Astros were prepared to pay him. Mottola, the fourth player in the Astros mix, went fifth overall, signing with the Cincinnati Reds for $400,000.

Though the Astros had a rocky relationship with Nevin that led to his being traded to Detroit in 1995 after playing just 18 games with the big league team, Nevin went on to play 12 years in the big leagues, retiring after the 2006 season. The Astros did sign one player in 1992 who is still active in the major leagues: lefthander Jaime Walker, a 10^th-round pick from Austin Peay State University.

The Billy Wagner Selection

The Astros had the 12^th pick in the 1993 draft and ended up taking Billy Wagner, one of the best closers of the last decade—not to mention being a great story as he was a 5-foot-10 southpaw from a remote Virginia Division III school. The pick made the Astros look like we knew what we were doing.

It was all pure dumb luck.

We thought, along with most people in baseball, that Wagner was a sure thing to be picked in the top 5 picks. We didn’t even factor him as a possible pick at No. 12. There were three players that we were focusing on for that pick (more on them below).

About an hour before the draft, Astros national crosschecker Paul Weaver, who is one of the scouting industry’s greatest networkers of all time, came into the draft room after a series of phone calls and bluntly stated, “What are we going to do when Wagner is there at No. 12, because he’s going to be?”

After the shock and disbelief wore off and we realized that Weaver was probably right (he almost always was about other team’s picks), it was pretty much a no-brainer. Wagner’s size and small-school background apparently scared off everyone ahead of Houston (Alex Rodriguez was the No. 1 pick that year, by the way) and he dropped in our lap.

The three players we were initially focusing on? Colorado high school shortstop Matt Brunson, who went to Detroit at No. 9 and quickly flushed himself out of pro ball due to off-field problems. Righthander Daron Kirkreit, a big college pitcher from Division II UC Riverside who went to the Indians at No. 11, hurt his arm and never pitched in the big leagues. Lefthander Kelly Wunsch, a lanky 6-foot-5 finesse pitcher from Texas A&M who lasted until the 26th pick and eventually carved out a journeyman career as a bullpen specialist with a sidearm delivery.

The Astros didn’t have second- or third-round picks that year because of the highly-publicized free-agent signings of hometown major leaguers Doug Drabek and Greg Swindell. The rest of that draft was horrible, with not a single player on a draft list that went 83 rounds deep ever playing in the big leagues for Astros and only two getting cups of coffee elsewhere. If Brunson, Kirkreit or even Wunsch had been the first-round pick, it might have been one of the worst drafts of all-time. But with Wagner, it produced an all-star and potential Hall of Famer.

Just by luck.

Julio Lugo

The Astros were at the forefront of the draft-and-follow movement (more on that later) and annually picked a huge number of players in the mid to later rounds with the intent to follow them over the next year and hope that even a couple might improve enough in junior college to warrant signing. In 1994, the Astros drafted 100 players. One of those players was Julio Lugo.

As part of the draft-and-follow program, area scout Chuck Edmondson, who had responsibility for northern Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, recommended Lugo, then a freshman at Connors State (Okla.) JC. Lugo, who was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Brooklyn, had played center field as a freshman but Edmondson, a former coach at Texarkana (Texas) JC who was very well connected in the JC ranks, knew that Lugo was going to play shortstop as a sophomore. The Astros picked Lugo in the 43^rd round (the 1,193rd overall selection), knowing he would go back to Connors State for his sophomore year.

Connors State came down to Texas about mid-season in the spring of 1995 to play at Panola JC in Carthage, about three hours from Houston. So I went to see the doubleheader and get my own evaluation on Lugo, who Edmondson said was playing really well.

Keep in mind that Lugo was pretty much an unknown. He was undrafted out of high school and likely would have been undrafted as a junior college freshman if the Astros and their long draft-and-follow net hadn’t caught him. He went to a small-town, dust-bowl JC in rural Oklahoma and there was no Major League Scouting Bureau report on him.

I’ve seen countless prospects before and since who were better prospects and graded out significantly higher than Lugo did that day. As happens in baseball, some play in All-Star Games; some don’t make it out of A ball.

But I’ve never been so sure that a player was going to play in the big leagues as I was when I left the forested ballpark in rural eastern Texas after watching Lugo play that day. I was equally dumbfounded that there seemed to be only one scout in the business, Edmondson, who had seen the same thing—and I was sure that I liked Lugo even more than Chuck did.

Lugo did everything that day you’d want to see as a scout. I recall that he went 7-for-8 at the plate, hitting rockets up the right-center field gap, pulling a home run to left, beating out a couple of ground balls while running sub-4.1 to first. He wasn’t a smooth and fluid shortstop but had the athletic ability and arm strength to play anywhere on the field. Plus, he was a high-energy leader on the field and in the dugout who had a constant smile on his face.

I found a pay phone (pre-cell phone days, believe it or not) in Carthage and left a series of messages basically saying, “We’re going to sign this kid no matter what it takes.” We did eventually sign him for $50,000, a pretty good bonus in 1995 but small change compared to the four-year, $32 million contract that Lugo is playing under now.

NEXT: Scott Kazmir, Jimmy Rollins and . . . Alvin Morman?