Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports
The Giants are just over three weeks away from one of the more confusing drafts in baseball history.
High school seniors did not have a season to impress scouts. There were only a few weeks worth of games to cull information from the college ranks before that year was shut down due to the coronavirus. A draft that was 40 rounds will be five. Teams not only don’t know enough about the players they will be drafting, they don’t know enough about which players their opponents will be drafting.
The Giants, who pick 13th, will have an important decision that they would like to be more informed about. Especially interesting is that the two players most often linked with San Francisco, according to The Athletic’s Keith Law, couldn’t be more different.
“The two names that came up with the Giants were [Tyler Soderstrom] and Garrett Crochet [from] the University of Tennessee,” the draft/minor league expert told KNBR’s Marty Lurie this weekend.
Soderstrom’s father, Steve, was a first-round pick of the Giants in 1993 and pitched in a couple games in 1996. The son is ostensibly a catcher out of Turlock, Cal., a big high school slugger who will be drafted more for his bat than his glove.
“Teams feel pretty confident in his ability to hit,” Law said. “There’s a non-zero chance he sticks at catcher. But also folks think he might be athletic enough to go to third base. If the bat really is what you think, he might be able to go to right field or something, there’s certainly enough upside there.”
Of course the Giants have Joey Bart in the pipeline, but you can imagine Farhan Zaidi appreciating Soderstrom’s flexibility.
The other path Law has heard they could go is for Crochet, a lefty who was barely seen this past season — he threw once, for just a couple innings, in front of scouts before the season was shuttered.
Yet, the Tennessee product is “maybe the hardest-throwing starter in the draft class,” Law said of Crochet, who reportedly can hit triple digits.