PHILADELPHIA – It wasn’t exactly the banner draft day for the Cubs as it was for the Sox, but the Cubbies did exactly what scouting director Dan Kantrovitz projected: they used the 23rd pick in Major League Baseball’s First-Year Player Draft to take a pitcher:
Right-hander Cade Townsend out of Mississippi.
“I think it’s no secret we’ve invested less in pitching in recent drafts,” Kantrovitz said during the week prior to Saturday’s event at the Philadelphia Convention Center. “There’s probably more scrutiny on that position than historically. Last year, it was high school position players. I don’t think we’re seeing that this year. It’s pretty scattered.”
Be that as it may, the Cubs picked the 6-1 Townsend, a 21-year-old sophomore with two seasons under his belt at Ole Miss. Townsend is known to have a 94-97 mph fastball and a high spin rate along with a slider, curveball and a cutter.
Starting regularly for the Rebels he was 5-3 with a 3.94 ERA, 88 strikeouts and 22 walks in 64 innings over 14 outings.
“You can’t take good pitching if you don’t take pitching,” Kantrovitz said about this year’s draft model. “In the last two years, in particular, we had to figure out how we allocated part of our draft pool to pitching without leaking wins or overall draft value, which has always been our north star.
“We go into our draft being pretty agnostic about position player versus pitching. Just wanting to take the best player available in the spirit of getting the most future wins out of the draft. The reality is this year we’re going to be less dogmatic sticking to that. To get more pitching, we might have to take more pitching.”
This year, it was pitching.