(670 The Score) The Cubs made an interesting selection in the 14th round of the MLB Draft on Tuesday.
They took Georgia’s Shane Marshall, who primarily was a catcher for the Bulldogs over his four-year college career but whom the Cubs intend to convert into a full-time pitcher. The 22-year-old Marshall appeared in just two games as a pitcher for Georgia this past season, logging 2/3 innings in total, but the Cubs took notice of his throwing arm and thought he was worth a risk on the third day of the MLB Draft, as vice president of scouting Dan Kantrovitz explained on the Mully & Haugh Show on Thursday morning.
“Any good scout will tell you, if you’ve seen it once, there’s a good chance you’re going to be able to see it again,” Kantrovitz said. “And I think that’s especially true when you look at what Shane did. He threw a couple lightning bolts with his fastball earlier in the spring that we were fortunate to have a look upon both from a scouting lens as well as from a data lens. When those two things align and it indicated a pretty unique, special pitch and then as we did a little bit more digging and talked to some coaches, tried to put this in context, we become confident that that was something that was indicative of really his current skill level. Again, like I said, it was a lightning bolt of a couple pitches that he was throwing both from a velocity standpoint as well as an angle standpoint. We got pretty excited about it. And then we started to dig in and talk to him and our area scout really ended up putting us in a position here where we could feel comfortable pulling the trigger. He’s got work to do. He’s going to work with our pitching guys and work on becoming a complete pitcher, establishing more of a repertoire than just that nasty fastball. But he’s an exciting one, and I think those are the types of risks and moves you can make on day three of the draft.”
In all, the Cubs took 16 pitchers among their 20 selections. Kantrovitz shed light on why they leaned so heavily in that direction.
“I don’t think it’s a secret that we need pitching, we want pitching,” he said. “And I think that’s not just true for us, but I think it’s probably true for almost every Major League team out there. And sometimes you see teams sort of skew a bit more toward pitching than hitting. Going into the draft, we couldn’t certainly precisely pinpoint exactly what that ratio of pitchers and hitters was going to be, but this was within the range of what we thought would be a successful outcome. Whether we would’ve taken a few more or a few less, you could’ve imagined that also would’ve been in the range of an acceptable outcome here. I think what it comes down to is it’s an artifact of one, what we continue to have a need for but also two, really it’s mostly – especially as you get into day three, when you saw us really take a lot of pitching – it’s where there’s room for guys to play. I think an artifact of having what happened with our minor league system last year, one was an influx of really exciting position players but two, there were fewer spots so unless we were looking at or staring at a position player that was just going to be better than what we already had, we were going to continue to stockpile our arms.”
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