MLB Draft Truncation Greatly Benefits Ole Miss Baseball in 2021
Run it back? That may be a more likely possibility for Ole Miss baseball in 2021 than we prior assumed.
Major League Baseball officially announced on Friday night that they'd be shortening the 2020 MLB Draft from 40 rounds to only five rounds because of the coronavirus pandemic. The move favors to save MLB teams around 30-million each, but it's also going to have wide-sweeping college baseball ramifications.
I wrote back in March, in my prior gig before SI, about how the possibility of shortening the draft could positively impact Ole Miss. That's now officially happening.
Eight Rebels were drafted in 2019 when the draft was 40 rounds. Three of them – Grae Kessinger, Thomas Dillard and Will Ethridge – went in the first five rounds. So theoretically, the likes of Cooper Johnson, Cole Zabowski and Houston Roth would have returned to Ole Miss in 2020 amid a shortened draft.
The NCAA has approved a waiver allowing spring-sport athletes an extra year of eligibility. Some Rebels have already accepted their extra year of eligibility. There may be a few more baseball seniors that wait on the outcome of the draft, which starts on June 10, before doing the same.
Of players on the 2020 Ole Miss baseball team, seven were draft eligible juniors. The only two Rebels that rank in the top-100 of Fangraphs' rank of draft-eligible college players are Anthony Servideo (63) and Tyler Keenan (84). There's a chance these players may be drafted in the first five, but there's also the factor of high schoolers who could be drafted.
So this presents the obvious recruiting questions. By base logic, a shorter draft means more high schoolers enrolling in colleges to play ball. The only Rebel high school commit ranked by Fangraphs (they rank the top 246 players) is T.J. McCants, a shortstop out of Florida who ranks No. 109.
The big benefits as far as Ole Miss baseball is concerned actually lies in all the names yet to even be mentioned in this article. Players of the likes of Tim Elko, Hayden Leatherwood and Cael Baker, who were draft eligible juniors, will almost certainly be back on the roster next year.
Then there's another group of Rebel seniors such as Taylor Broadway and Austin Miller, that would previously have had no choice whether to go pro or end their baseball career. They're not likely to hear their names called in a five round draft and now could come back and pick up that extra year of eligibility.
Until June 10, there's no true way to know what the Rebel team will look like in 2021. But it's fair to assume the team will be equally as loaded as the one that ended the shortened 2020 season 16-1.
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