Happy MLB Draft Day! This is a truly wonderful day, because if, like me, you love promise and potential and watching kids’ dreams come true, you love the draft! And if you for some reason do not love joy and happiness, you should also be happy, because this marks the last week we will be blitzing you with draft coverage. This should be a particularly fun draft because outside of a top few choices, there’s almost no consensus about who will go when. I’m extremely curious about what the Mariners will do with their picks, as we’re still early in the Dipoto Draft era, and while there’s a developing pattern of first round polished collegiate bat/second round HS player/arms arms and MORE arms, it’s also possible things go completely wonky-bananas.
Here is everything you need to know to follow the draft yourself!
- Here’s a link to the draft order for this year. The Mariners pick at 14, 54, 90, 118, and on and on until things become like that tweet about the sun getting bigger.
- Draft coverage begins at 3 PM on MLB Network, and the draft itself starts at 4 PM Pacific time, because everything exists to please our overlords in the East. You can also follow online if you’re at work, which you are because it starts during the workday for us, at MLB.com.
- Only the first round and the first Competitive Balance round are televised; the second round and the second CB round will only be on MLB.com.
- Day Two of the draft, Rounds 3-10, are only on MLB.com; the preview show starts at 9:30 AM PT and the draft itself at 10 AM PT.
- Day Three of the draft, Rounds 11-on, are only on MLB.com, and the draft begins at 9 AM PT.
The Mariners have a total of $7,555,200 to spend on draft signing bonuses. That’s the second-highest amount in the AL West, although well-short of the 9.5MM-plus the A’s have to spend, but actually ranks in the bottom third of budgets, mostly because they don’t have any compensation picks or competitive balance picks. You can find out more about how money gets allotted here.
If you’re following via Twitter, @MLBDraftTracker will list all the picks. For analysis, anyone from the Baseball America team, @JonathanMayo, or Jim Callis are all good follows.
We’ll have live draft threads for you to talk about the picks, as well as some capsule summaries of each player selected as the draft goes on. If you want to get up to speed with some of our draft coverage, search the “Seattle Mariners Draft” section on the site. So far we’ve covered past drafts, a positional breakdown of the depth at the farm, looked at some targets from most of the major college conferences, and reported on some of the players mock drafts have us taking.
Happy Draft Day!