Draft Preview - Toronto Blue Jays

The ninth team draft preview on my blog focuses on the Toronto Blue Jays and their scouting director Andrew Tinnish.

Here's an excerpt from the writeup, which features small writeups on 11 players involved with Tinnish's work:

Since it’s precarious to use past draft budgets under a different regime, I’ll just go ahead and dive right now to the picks that Toronto has and the slot amounts they’ll be carrying. They’re still waiting on Rod Barajas to sign with another team, but I’m assuming that he will shortly, and they’ll get the compensation pick for him. So assuming that happens, the Blue Jays will hold picks 11, 34, 38, 41, 61, 69, 80, 93, 113, 126, and every 30 picks after that. All I have to say is that they’ve set themselves up for a strong recovery if they play their cards right this June. Looking at just their picks in the top five rounds, their slots will be right at about $7 million for those picks, assuming that slotting stays the same for this year. I actually expect slots to rise a bit, so it might be more than that. I don’t expect the new scouting regime to sign every single player to slot money. It might be better to mix in a few signable collegiate players who will sign for less than slot, then distribute extra money in later round picks that want more than the low slot money. I’m going to conservatively predict that they spend $8 million total on signing bonuses this year, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a number as high as $10 million, but that might be pushing it. Either way, you will definitely see the Blue Jays start spending real money in the draft this June.

Direct link here.

I'm also running a special on the 2010 MLB Draft Notebook, as the next 30 buyers will be entered in a drawing for an autographed baseball from Jameson Taillon. If you'd like to read more about the promotion, go ahead and do so here.

What do you think? What will the Blue Jays do?