This year’s edition of the MLB Draft begins tomorrow at 1pm with the White Sox on the clock. The Orioles, after their disappointing season, ended up with a little bit of bad luck when the draft lottery played out and received the #7 pick in the draft for their trouble. They had the fourth-best odds of getting the top pick. It didn’t work out that way, so the consensus top three prospects, Roch Cholowsky of UCLA, Texas high school shortstop Grady Emerson, and Georgia Tech catcher Vahn Lackey are out of their reach.
Who could the Orioles pick? No one can say for sure, for a variety of reasons. One is that the Orioles front office keeps a tight ship and they do not have their business leaking out to the media often. When it comes to the draft, that means that anything like a mock draft is usually just guessing based on what other teams think about who the Orioles like.
Another reason it’s hard to say is that there are six picks ahead of the O’s and there are a lot of permutations of players who could be available to the Orioles, which might lead to them choosing different guys depending on who falls down to their pick and who doesn’t. The baseball media does its best to make guesses about who the Orioles like and who they would pick.
Across five national baseball media outlets, there are four different mock picks for the Orioles at #7. That seems like a good set of names to have in mind for who could be picked. Some of these outlets could do a final mock on the day of the draft. For now, these are the most recent mocks across the prospect-writing world:
Drew Burress, OF, Georgia Tech
The mock drafts by both Baseball America and MLB Pipeline have converged on the same player. I think that these outlets have settled on Burress because he’s the most Mike Elias-era Orioles draft pick out there: Strong performing college outfielder with power potential. They have used their top pick on a college outfielder in five of the last six drafts, undeterred in spite of mixed results for the major league club.
In terms of his results with the Yellow Jackets, Burress has an advantage over some of their recent picks. Burress hits for respectable power, in contrast to Enrique Bradfield, and he hasn’t struck out much, in contrast to Vance Honeycutt. Burress walked more than he struck out in every year of his college career. Listed at 5’9” with scouting reports saying he may be shorter than that, Burress checks in as the #7 prospect on Pipeline’s ranking of the draft class. They write:
Burress is a quality athlete with a high baseball IQ and a strong work ethic. He uses his solid speed to steal an occasional base and to chase down balls in center field, where most evaluators believe he can remain as a pro.
Other mock drafts in this roundup have Burress gone before the Orioles get a chance to choose him, with the Pirates at #5 and the Royals at #6 seen as possible Burress landing spots.
Eric Booth Jr., OF, Oak Grove (Miss.) HS
The Athletic’s Keith Law delivers a mock that brings Booth, one of the top two or three high school players in the draft class, to the Orioles at #7. What makes this an outlier among the mocks is that the other four outlets all think Booth will be gone by the time the Orioles make their pick, either at #4 to the Giants or #5 to the Pirates.
Law writes that “word the Orioles want Booth, might take Drew Burress, have no realistic hope of getting Jackson Flora, and have a mixed camp on Jacob Lombard (who supposedly had a great workout in front of their execs).” That’s more confident than people usually sound about Orioles draft thinking.
Scouting reports like the one at FanGraphs make Booth seem like a development challenge with a lot of potential. Your own interest in the Orioles taking this player probably depends on your confidence level in how they would handle things like this:
Booth is a unique, fascinating, and difficult-to-parse prospect, with premium tools and a very strange swing that might not enable him to hit as it is currently constituted. … It’s weird looking and also odd, because Booth isn’t an especially long-levered guy; it just takes his swing quite some time to enter the hitting zone. This may be ripe for a change, maybe even proactively … Overall, Booth is one of the more exciting and volatile prospects in this draft, and his future might be dictated by who picks him up, as a team with good player development might turn him into a top-of-the-order monster.
I do not have a high confidence level in the Orioles figuring out what to do with “a very strange swing that might not enable him to hit.”
Law’s report mentions Jackson Flora, who is a pitcher, and there is at least one mock willing to say that the Orioles have hope of getting Flora and will actually take him.
Jackson Flora, RHP, UC Santa Barbara
There is typically at least one mock draft that’s willing to go out on a limb and guess that the Orioles will finally take a pitcher with their top pick in a draft. As we know, this has not occurred yet. ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel takes the plunge for this year, putting out a mock that has Flora fall to the Orioles and they actually take him.
Flora is not available at #7 in any of the other mocks, going at either #4, #5, or #6. This is usually the case with pitchers that the Orioles are said to like. I remember mock drafts back in 2021 saying that the Orioles would take Jack Leiter if he fell to them. Leiter was picked in a surprise by the Rangers at #2. Five years later, Leiter has negative career WAR in 53 games pitched.
McDaniel on Flora, where he’s rated as #4 on the draft board:
Flora is the picture of a pitching prospect in many ways, at 6-foot-5 with physical projection, a pretty delivery that hits the key checkpoints at the right time, a heater up to 100 mph and four above-average pitches with starter traits. … Flora’s stuff is more above average to plus and his command is mostly average rather than earning true potential ace-level grades, even though he can look a tick better on both counts at times. I have Flora as a projected midrotation starter with a chance to become a frontline starter.
Tyler Bell, SS, Kentucky
Bell is the mock pick by Eric Longenhagen at FanGraphs. This player is taken after the Orioles in every other mock draft out of this lineup. About the pick, Longenhagen notes that the Orioles have had a tendency to draft “toolsy hitters with strikeout issues, including some who feel like they have zero chance to hit,” and in that vein he tosses out a possibility of Florida high school shortstop Jacob Lombard – taken within the top six in most of the other mocks, including the FG mock. Nobody seems to think that other teams will be scared off by Lombard.
Longenhagen also describes the Orioles as “prioritiz(ing) players who can access power and have positional value, and similar to Colton Cowser a few years ago, Bell is that guy.” The idea of the Orioles taking another Cowser-type player would be more exciting if Cowser had consistently played as well as he did in his rookie year. That has not occurred.
Bell, a draft-eligible sophomore, batted. .343/.510/.608 for the Wildcats this season. He did this while playing through a torn labrum in his non-throwing shoulder that he suffered in the first game of the season. The injury led Bell to miss close to a month worth of games, with a longer absence before he got back into the infield.
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Out of these possibilities, I am Team Burress, but I will not get my hopes up because some other team could do a surprise move and take him or Elias could do a surprise move and draft some guy that none of these mocks predicted. It wouldn’t be the first time. Who do you like out of this draft class?
