Draft Day One Recap: Pirates Add Another Potential Number One to the Mix

by Tim Williams
http://www.piratesprospects.com/
June 5, 2012

Coming in to the 2012 Draft, every mock draft had the same seven players going in the first seven picks. A few mock drafts mentioned the possibility of some players falling — mainly Mike Zunino and Albert Almora — but no one expected Mark Appel (pictured above) to fall. But he fell, and fell, and landed with the Pittsburgh Pirates with the eighth overall pick.

“We said we were going to stay true to the board. We said we’d take the best player available on the board. And we’ve done that in big, strong, physical right-hander Mark Appel,” Pirates’ General Manager Neal Huntington said. “He brings us a quality combination of stuff, of size, of strength, of abilities, obviously strong background. We’re very pleased he was sitting there when it was our selection at No. 8 in the country. Another great start to which is going to be another deep and talented draft for the Pirates.”

No one really expected Appel to fall to the Pirates. The Stanford right-hander entered the year as the near unanimous top prospect on the draft boards, and was considered a candidate to go first overall, and no later than the top four. Baseball America had him rated as the third best prospect in the draft in their final rankings. His fall was unexpected, but that doesn’t mean the Pirates didn’t prepare.

“One of the beautiful parts about going through the process is to attack every player as if they’re going to be available at your pick,” Huntington said. “You do the work. You do the preparation. You do the study so that when the player comes available, you like him, you take him. We projected much like the rest of the industry that he would go earlier, but we feel very comfortable with the selection and we took the best remaining player available.”

The Pirates didn’t just casually scout Appel either. They’ve been following him closely since high school.

“I’m not sure there was a start this year that we missed,” Huntington said. “I think we had one, if not multiple people at every one of his starts. We’ve followed him in high school. We followed him all through his freshman year, all through his sophomore year, all through his junior year. There isn’t much that he’s done that we haven’t had someone watching the team that he was playing for or especially him.”

Read more: http://www.piratesprospects.com/2012/06/draft-day-one-recap-pirates-add-another-potential-number-one-to-the-mix.html