San Diego Padres: MLB Draft Wish List

With the MLB Draft fast approaching, let’s expand our wish list of probable San Diego Padres draft picks, covering rounds one-three.

Are you ready to find out who joins the San Diego Padres organization? As the love of minor league baseball and thirst for information about prospects continues to grow at a tremendous rate, so has interest in the Major League Baseball draft. The MLB draft isn’t a big media circus like the NFL or NBA draft, for legitimate reasons.

When your favorite NFL team drafts a player, you immediately watch his mini-camp performance. Three months later, that player (along with every other draft pick) is given ample playing time in pre-season. Odds are, a number of those draft picks become starters or key pieces to the team’s regular season successes or failures.

On the flip side of that, when your favorite team (the Padres) drafts a player, he gets shipped off to Arizona or Pasco, Washington (home of the Tri-City Dust Devils). If it’s a more polished, college player, you might see him in spring training action in two years, longer if it’s a high school player.

Regular season college baseball is essentially non-existent on major sports TV networks and detailed information/scouting/analysis on players and teams is hard to come by.

As far as pre-draft coverage, there are a number of outstanding websites that provide detailed scouting reports on hundreds of draft prospects. Thanks to the work of people like Kiley McDaniel at FanGraphs, John Sickels and staff at MinorLeagueBall.com, Adam McInturff and John T. Eshleman of 2080ball.com, and the crews at Baseball America and MLB Pipeline, we have live scouting reports at our fingertips.

The information for the following list was compiled using these sources along with Youtube videos, watching players when possible on TV, and discussions with fellow writers who follow the MLB draft closely.

What follows are names of nine players, in no particular order, that I think are good fits for this Padres team. With four picks in the top 100, San Diego has an opportunity to add even more elite talent to the league’s top farm system.