College arm? Best hitter on board? Inside Bucs' potential strategy for No. 6 pick

PITTSBURGH – After months of scouting and traveling, the Pirates’ Draft team will reconvene in Pittsburgh next week to formally map out their strategy ahead of this year’s MLB Draft, which will take place July 13-14 in Atlanta.

Holding the sixth overall pick, the Pirates will have their second lottery pick in three years. Of course there is always a pressure to nail a first-round pick, but it’s going to be the second time in three years where the Pirates are picking higher than the previous year’s record would indicate because they caught a break in the Draft Lottery. That just makes the pick all the more important.

The general buzz is this is shaping up to be a good crop of collegiate arms, especially at the top of the class, with MLB Pipeline having four college pitchers in their top 10 Draft prospects. The Pirates have found success drafting and developing collegiate pitchers with early picks in recent years, so there’s an obvious allure there. Paul Skenes is the most obvious example, but Hunter Barco and Thomas Harrington were also drafted out of college and are now Top 100 prospects. Carmen Mlodzinski was the first collegiate pitcher this regime drafted, and he’s grown into a quality Major League pitcher.

Of course, it’s no guarantee that the Pirates will take a college arm, or a pitcher in general. There’s still plenty to sort out, but as general manager Ben Cherington shared Saturday before the Pirates’ 9-2 win over the Mets at PNC Park, the underlying goal remains the same: to draft the best player available. They did so last year, taking Konnor Griffin rather than a more Major League-ready collegiate player. Griffin has been one of the top hitting prospects across baseball this year and has already risen to High-A Greensboro, so it’s hard to argue against the pick.

Still, there are some underlying sentiments that are worth exploring on who the Pirates should draft. They all factor into the decision-making process, but to look at it in the most black-and-white terms:

1. Take a college pitcher

The case for: It’s a deep class and the Pirates are boasting one of the deepest pools of young pitching talent because of their development team.

“We’re confident in our ability to draft and develop pitching, certainly,” Cherington said. “So, if that’s the way it falls and it’s a pitcher, we’ll be excited about that. But we have to create more offense, too. We know that as an organization. It’s going to come down to the best player and it will be up to us, and I’m very confident that we’re going to create a very good onboarding and development plan for whoever it is, and get them off to a good track in their pro career.”

2. Take the best hitter

The case for: The Pirates have pitching, enough so that they have tried to trade it for more hitters over the past year. Why not just cut out the middle man and take a bat to help the offense?

“I don’t believe that doing that, especially in a place like Pittsburgh, is ever going to be about one thing,” Cherington said. “One decision, one free agent, one trade, one Draft pick, it’s never going to be about that. It’s going to be about 100 things. We need to create more offense. So what I want to avoid in the Draft is making our decision any harder because of that. Let’s just find the best player, and with that, we need to create more offense over time.”

3. Take the most Major League-ready player

The case for: There is plenty of pitching in place in the Majors, so the Pirates might not be too far off from competing. Take someone who can help the team as soon as possible.

“One of the things I’m really excited about in how our Draft process has evolved, and I really feel like it keeps getting better over time, is that the question [of when they’ll be in the Majors] is sort of baked into the process,” Cherington said. “I don’t feel like now we’re really having to think about the decision between upside and risk of being further away, versus closer and safer.

“I think it’s all part of the process, and the process itself is, I believe, doing a good job of capturing all of that. Capturing both the upside and the risk of every player. It’s getting them in an order, and we’re going to be disciplined and honor that order when we’re done with it on July [13] and just take the best player available.”