Mariners Director of Amateur Scouting Scott Hunter met with the media on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the team’s approach in the upcoming draft, where the Mariners will be picking at #15 in the first round. While many outlets foresee the Mariners selecting college pitching or maybe a college position player, Hunter says with this particular draft, the team won’t be locking itself into any one particular demographic, specifically stating the team wouldn’t be afraid to take high school pitching, a class they’ve largely avoided with the first-round pick. The Dipoto-era Mariners have never used a first-round pick on a prep pitcher; the last one the Mariners selected was Taijuan Walker, back in 2010.
Hunter addressed the challenges in scouting what he calls a “thinner” draft than last year’s stacked class, where the Mariners came away with two players in the first round who have already climbed onto Top-100 lists, plus two more pushing for consideration in Tai Peete and Aidan Smith. Most outlets are fairly aligned on what the first ten or so picks will look like in this draft, but split after that, especially around where the Mariners will be picking. After the top 10 or so consensus players are off the board, Hunter describes it as “dealer’s choice.”
“It’s going to be more of a challenge,” he said. “I think we’re going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting in figuring out or extracting the players that we really believe in for what the Mariners do. The depth of the draft is a lot different. It’s a weird class. There’s a lot of high school pitching, which I know we haven’t really done much at the top of the draft with, but is actually really in play for us, because we have to consider every demographic in the draft.”
“We want to make sure we’re giving ourselves the best chance to make a good decision. Sometimes the high school pitcher could be that guy.”
Even if the Mariners don’t break form and go with a high school arm with their first pick, there’s a strong chance they could go that way with their second pick, at #55. Says Hunter: “There is a deep part of this draft, probably in the back half of the first round through the 50s, that is high school heavy, especially high school arms, and you see some teams in years past are cutting real big deals in the front to go load up on the back end and take some of that risk off the plate.”
That’s a strategy the Mariners have used in years past; in 2022, after selecting high-schooler Cole Young in the first round they took a “money-saver” pick in selecting Tyler Locklear, who has already made his MLB debut, in the second round, allowing them the flexibility to take two straight prep arms in the third round: Walter Ford, with their competitive balance pick, and Ashton Izzi, as well as another prep arm in the ninth round, righty Tyler Gough. While Ford is on a longer trajectory, both Izzi and Gough, both 20, have made significant strides forward this year at Low-A Modesto. Izzi has gone from striking out 10 batters in 15 innings in April to striking out 25 in 26.2 innings in June, while Gough, in his second try at the level but his first full season, has lowered his walk rate and amped up his punchouts on his second look at the California League.
But maybe the strongest argument for rolling the dice on a prep pitcher is the development of RHP Michael Morales, drafted in the third round in 2021 as the third straight high school player the Mariners took as they signaled their shift to starting a new wave of young prospects. (A draft where they also, it should be said, got current members of the rotation Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo in the fourth and sixth rounds, respectively.) Morales was the earliest the Mariners had taken a prep pitcher since back in 2017, when they used their second-round pick on Minnesota high-schooler Sam Carlson, who dealt with recurring arm issues and never made it to the big leagues as a Mariner before becoming a minor-league free agent. After scuffling his first two years in the system, repeating Low-A Modesto in 2023 with similarly middling success, Morales broke out this year despite moving up to High-A Everett, and recently earned a promotion to Double-A Arkansas. The trajectory for high school pitchers isn’t usually straightforward, but as Morales, Izzi, and Gough show, the right drafting and development, plus a little patience, can reward clubs that are willing to roll the dice on one of the draft’s riskiest demographics.
“When you get the right high school player—like as scouts, you’re always looking at what’s happening three or four years from now,” said Hunter. “And with Michael Morales, he was going to Vanderbilt, he would be a junior now, he would probably be eligible for the draft now. So you want to give him three or four years, like he’s developing in college, and he’s just under our wing [instead].”
As for picking the “right” high school player, Hunter says that’s a process that is informed by the trust everyone in the organization has in each other, built over time, from scouting, to analysts, to player development, all of whom are in constant communication, as opposed to the old way of doing things, where knowledge was “siloed” off among departments. Through this collaborative process, Hunter and his team hope to identify, even in young players, those who are “wired right,” a checklist of attributes Hunter ticks off: are they invested in signing, or are they invested in becoming a major leaguer? Do they like the work? Do they want to get better? Do they like the stuff that goes into the game that’s not fun? If a player ticks all of those boxes, plus has a skillset that intrigues the Mariners, they’re willing to take a chance on them becoming a major-leaguer, no matter what their background is.
“Every draft has its own personality, and last year it was so heavy with high school, upside position players that in a year where we had three picks it was the right thing to do,” said Hunter. “What Jerry’s really preached over the years, and what I’ve learned, is that you’ve got to take what the draft gives you. It’s never about what you’re taking. It’s about what you’re walking by. And in this year’s draft, if the right high school player falls to us, I think we would do it again.”
Whichever way the Mariners go, know that they are acting with a firm process in place, one that’s been refined over the past eight years. That’s lead to a tremendous amount of trust and a smooth process in their draft room—so much so that Hunter was early to meet with the media, saying they’d wrapped up early that day. Hopefully Hunter and company enjoyed the brief respite of peace, as things will only get more intense as the clock ticks down to this year’s draft, which you can watch on MLB Network starting July 14 at 2 PM PT.
