Pittsburgh Pirates: Baseball America’s February 2020 Mock Draft

The Pittsburgh Pirates have the seventh overall pick in this year’s Major League Baseball Draft.  Here is an update on who they could look at with the selection.

The Pittsburgh Pirates have their first spring training game in just two days and before you know it, it will be Opening Day in baseball.  One of the things that General Manager Ben Cherington and Assistant General Manager Steven Sanders have to look forward to is the Major League Baseball draft in June.

For the first time since 2013, the Pittsburgh Pirates have a top 10 pick, setting them up to find a high-quality prospect.  The new Front Office has stressed the importance of finding the high-upside talent through the draft and they will get their first chance to do so on June 10th.  Furthermore, Cherington and Sanders have a reputation for being able to identify upside draft prospects.

The Major League Baseball draft is less than four months away.  Spring baseball for high school is starting up and colleges have already started to play in games.  This is allowing sites like MLB Pipeline and Baseball America to start to produce more relevant coverage of the 2020 draft class.

In fact, Baseball America put out an updated first-round mock draft yesterday looking at the first 29 picks (Houston lost their pick).  The site apparently had a scout help them put it together.  They have the Pittsburgh Pirates selecting a college pitcher by the name of Reid Detmers.  Detmers is a projectable, left-handed pitcher who currently is pitching for the Louisville Cardinals.

Here is some of Baseball America’s scouting report on the left-hander:

"Perhaps the most polished strike thrower in the 2020 class, Detmers last year set a Louisville program record with 167 strikeouts and tied the program record with 13 wins. A 6-foot-2, 210-pound lefty with a workhorse frame, Detmers has a fastball that gets into the mid 90s but plays up thanks to good deception. He couples that with a devastating curveball that has big-time depth"

This is an interesting prediction by Baseball America.  Former General Manager Neal Huntington rarely selected left-handed pitchers, especially with his higher picks.  Also, he tended to stay away from college pitchers with Gerrit Cole and Mark Appel representing the only two college arms he took in the first round during his tenure as General Manager.

Detmer sounds like he could be a really solid prospect to add to a farm system that is somewhat depleted in their pitching.  He is an experienced lefty who has power stuff, which is obviously attractive.  However, Detmer has plus control and good secondary pitches, pair that with his college experience and it could allow him to move up the minor league levels relatively quickly.