Draft Preview - San Francisco Giants

The twenty-first team draft preview on my blog focuses on the San Francisco Giants and their scouting director John Barr.

Here's an excerpt from the writeup, which features small writeups on 10 players involved with Barr's work:

John Barr is probably the most accomplished scouting director when you consider his age and experience levels. Only in his early-50s, Barr has as much high-level scouting experience as any scouting director in the entire game of baseball. He became the Orioles’ scouting director shortly after turning 30, and has run a combined eight drafts including the two drafts he has run since joining the Giants. Directly before joining the Giants, he was the Dodgers’ East Coast crosschecker for ten years, running possibly the best region in a club that developed a number of homegrown players. His official title with San Francisco is Special Assistant to the General Manager for Scouting, but he functions as a scouting director. He’s simply at a higher place in the food chain than some scouting directors are. That’s well deserved, and I consider Barr one of the best scouting directors in the game. Looking at his first two drafts with the Giants, the first glaring trend is a desire to nab players that have slipped a little more than expected in their draft year. That fits for Gillaspie, Kieschnick, Crawford, Joseph, and Stoffel, all names that were considered in the first round equation at one point in the 12 months before their respective drafts. That’s intriguing to me, because they wouldn’t have been even in the conversation if they weren’t immensely talented to begin with. The fact that Barr has drafted five of those players in just two years is incredible, with Matt Graham being an addition to that, as he was in the top ten conversation two years before his draft year. A second high-level trend is a tendency to lean towards power hitters, or at the least hitters with a solid future at the plate. Crawford was the notable exception, being more of a speed and defense guy, but in general Barr likes the guys that can do something with the bat. Joseph was a fairly polished prep bat, and the rest were college bats, an interesting trend in itself. Barr generally prefers getting pitchers from the collegiate level, though the high picks have been relievers. Wheeler was the first significant investment in a prep arm for Barr, and Graham comes in second. While I think this was more about opportunity, I also think that Barr and company are more willing to take prep arms than is thought by simply looking at the draft lists. All in all, he has a fairly balanced draft strategy utilizing a set plan that works well.

Direct link here.

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What do you think? What will the Giants do?