FanGraphs perspective of the '23 Draft Class

[CharmCityHokie]

For anyone interested, Eric Longenhagen weighs in on the '23 draft class here: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/a-2023-draft-rankings-update/

I found this part particularly interesting as I thought that the '23 class was initially predicted to be more college-heavy due to Covid pushing a lot of '20 high school kids to college:

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Scouts and executives tend to think this is a rather strong, if incomplete, draft class. The high schoolers in this year’s crop are especially talented and deep. There will likely be high-upside high schoolers available after the end of the second round, which probably means there will be a handful of them who end up going to school, strengthening the draft class three years from now, too. Major League Baseball doesn’t scale the league-wide bonus pool up and down based on the quality of the class — there’s only so much money to go around — and this year there are probably more good high schoolers than there is money to pay them to skip school. Teams with comp picks after the second round are sitting pretty and will have access to more talent with those picks than usual. The high school position players, especially the infielders, are particularly deep.

For the second consecutive year, there isn’t an especially exciting crop of college pitchers. After the names at the very top of the draft board (LSU’s Paul Skenes, Florida’s Hurston Waldrep, Tennessee’s Chase Dollander), there is a yawning chasm before you get to the next tier of college pitchers. It’s strange that we’ve had a multi-year dip in pitching prospect quality when the technological tools and infrastructure to understand and develop pitching have existed at the college level for a while now. Some schools are even better at developing arms than a handful of big league orgs, and a lot of the big-budget programs have pumped money into the same tech that good pro orgs use to assess their own players, but the results across the sport haven’t been very good lately.