I’m bored and so I thought I’d take a quick look back at the 2001 draft, the Prior draft to see what else was available. I tried to keep it round by round to look at realistic talent available each round to see what we could have ended up with.
Round 1
Cubs Select: Mark Prior (2nd pick)
Other Notable round selections: Mark Teixeira (5th pick), Casey Kotchman (13th pick), David Wright (38th pick)
Round 2
Cubs Select: Andrew Sisco (2nd pick)
Other Notable round selections: J.J. Hardy (12th pick), Dan Haren (28th pick)
Round 3
Cubs Select: Ryan Theriot (2nd pick)
Other Notable round selections: Kirk Saarloos (10th pick), Scott Hairston (22nd pick)
Round 4
Cubs Select: Ricky Nolasco (2nd pick)
Other Notable round selections: David Bush (3rd pick), Jeff Keppinger (8th pick)
Round 5
Cubs Select: Brendan Harris (2nd pick)
Other Notable round selections: Ryan Howard (4th pick), Skip Schumaker (28th pick)
Later Rounds
Cubs Select: Sergio Mitre (7th round), Geovany Soto (11th round)
Other Notable late round selections: Edwin Jackson (6th round), Kevin Youkilis (8th round), Dan Uggla (11th round), Chris Young (16th round), Johny Gomes (18th round), Zach Duke (20th round), Andre Ethier (37th round)
What’s the point of this exercise? I’m not really sure. I guess boredom more than anything. It’s fun to look back and see what might have been. Imagine if we still took Prior, but then hit with Haren, Bush, Jackson and a guy like Ethier. Wow.
Ryan Howard in the 5th round, wow.
Interesting to see that Geo and Theriot were drafted the same year as Prior. They don’t seem like contemporaries since they took such different paths to the bigs.
Agreed
hindsight…blah blah blah…
I just remember being very excited to have selected Prior. I thought, as did a handful of others, that he was going to have a long and stellar major league career.
Handful = pretty much everyone, everywhere.
I’ll take a slightly different view (as I am wont to do), and say I think we did reasonably well. Prior should have been the class of the draft, (Joe Mauer was taken ahead of him was he not?), but eventually proved to be soft despite his outward appearance. 26 other clubs also did not pick Dan Haren in the 2nd round. By my count, (could be wrong) there are 4 Cub selections on current ML rosters. Not too bad.
A recurring daydream….If I had a time machine, and could go backwards, I could have been the most successful baseball GM ever simply by scanning the draft sheet for recognizable names. The problem is they are mostly recognizable in hind sight.
Nice exercise Joe, keep ‘em coming.
thats a pretty decent draft year for the Cubs. Any time you can get 3-4 big league contributors out of a draft year I’d say thats pretty good. No one knew Prior was going to be a bust. His juice abuse would seem to have caused some serious tendon damage. As dominant a college pitcher as I have ever seen.
That’s a pretty good draft. The first 5 all making the majors (though not all with the Cubs) has to be considered a success.
Joe, good choice of an off-day topic.
Lizzie, they’re all “off days” this year
I blame Milton.