The Orioles chose the correct son of a longtime major leaguer at #1. Will any other picks pay off?
With the introduction of a lottery for top draft picks negotiated into baseball’s Collective Bargaining Agreement beginning with the 2023 Draft, the Orioles stopped stinking at just the right time. They had the worst record in the 2021 season and they are the last team to take that into an automatic #1 pick in the following Draft.
Added to that were picks in both competitive balance round A (after the first round) and round B (after the second round). The Orioles had two such picks because they acquired the round B pick from the Marlins in the surprise late spring training deal that sent Tanner Scott and Cole Sulser to Miami. This meant that the O’s had nearly $17 million to play with in their bonus pool for the Draft, the biggest of any team and well ahead of almost every other team.
Jackson Holliday
Headed into the Draft, the feeling seemed to be that the Orioles were going to choose between three high school players. Two were sons of former big leaguers, with Jackson Holliday (son of Matt) and Druw Jones (son of Andruw) rating high on draft boards, as well as a Georgia high schooler named Termarr Johnson. I read all of the scouting reports and I really liked Druw Jones. Mike Elias liked Holliday.
His judgment looks much better than mine. It usually does. Three years out from the picks being made, Jones has not made it above the High-A level, where he’s batting .248/.319/.320 with just one home run in 78 games played. Johnson is in Double-A with Pittsburgh, where he’s now batted .249/.332/.389 across two seasons. Holliday, as we know, dominated the minors, climbed to a consensus if not unanimous #1 prospect ranking, and arrived in MLB early last season. He’s only 21 and he’s got 143 MLB games under his belt.
As we all remember, it was not immediately smooth sailing for Holliday after his promotion to MLB. Visions of his following in Gunnar Henderson’s footsteps with winning of the Rookie of the Year were swiftly dashed, with Holliday doing so poorly over his first two weeks that the team demoted him back to the minors, where he stayed for nearly three months. In the meantime, fellow 20-year-old Jacksons Chourio (of the Brewers) and Merrill (of the Padres) turned in great rookie seasons. This was distressing.
The story turned around somewhat by season’s end, as Holliday from July 31 onwards was able to perform at a level that, while not good, was still playable for a contending team letting its incredibly young player figure things out at the MLB level. Holliday’s August/September 2024 was comparable to what Chourio and Merrill did through about June. I was on the Holliday hype train for 2025.
Things are going much better for Holliday in 2025, at least in terms of how he’s hitting. He hit his 12th homer of the season last night, bringing him close to the team lead for the season. After last night’s multi-hit game, he’s batting .263/.313/.425 for the season. I’d like him to get the OBP higher if he’s going to live as the leadoff hitter, but that’s great improvement compared to what happened last year.
It also appears that the Orioles are just letting Holliday run wild on the bases. This experiment is not bearing fruit up to this point, with Holliday posting a 9/17 success rate in steals. It’s not good. If one wants to rationalize, perhaps he is learning and the result will be 20+ steal seasons with better success rates down the road. There seems to be some learning to do on defense as well, as Holliday is scoring poorly in publicly available metrics like Defensive Runs Saved and Statcast’s Outs Above Average.
Dylan Beavers
This is a familiar story for longtime Camden Chat readers that I’m going to tell again: On day 1 of the 2022 Draft, when the Orioles were due to pick again, MLB Network showed a list of “best available” players on the screen. I turned to my wife and asked, purely based on the names, who she thought the Orioles should take. She exclaimed, “Beavers!” and that’s exactly who the O’s drafted. He’s a favorite in this household for that reason.
Beavers, just 20 at the time the Orioles drafted him, was coming off a sophomore season with California where he’d hit 17 homers in 56 games. The MLB Pipeline ranking of draft prospects put him at #22 in the class, a real steal with the 33rd pick. Other rankings had Beavers as more of a mid-second round talent.
The Orioles got an interesting first full pro season out of Beavers in 2023, with him batting .288/.383/.467 across 119 games between High-A and Double-A. The power wasn’t there as a pro, yet, with just 11 homers in that time. More modest results with Double-A last year halted the momentum somewhat.
Beavers has gone back in an exciting direction with Triple-A Norfolk this season, rounding into an interesting hitter. He’s batting .319/.407/.504 in 65 games with the Tides, with a 13.2% walk rate and just a 17.5% strikeout rate. He’s hit ten homers and stolen 19 bases. With 2025 being a lost season for the Orioles in terms of making the postseason, they should probably find a way to clear him playing time by August 1 and see what he can do as an audition with the rest of the season.
Max Wagner
The Orioles used their second round pick on the ACC Player of the Year for the 2022 season, Clemson third baseman Max Wagner. At the time of the draft, Eric Longenhagen of FanGraphs described Wagner as having some “tip of the iceberg” characteristics. That meant he could be on the verge of a breakout due to having come from a cold weather state (Wisconsin) and not getting a lot of early college playing time. He hit 27 home runs as a sophomore at Clemson. If that carried over into the pros, the O’s would look smart for this pick.
It was not the tip of the iceberg for good things to come. The power did not carry over to the pros. Wagner has battled assorted injuries as a professional and this year at Double-A is batting .217/.296/.343. That’s not going to get him put on the 40-man roster to protect him from this year’s Rule 5 Draft and it’s probably not going to get him drafted in that draft either.
Jud Fabian
If it wasn’t for the rumor that floated out about the Orioles having wanted Fabian in 2022, only to have him be picked one slot before them in the second round that year, he probably wouldn’t have made as much of an impression when the O’s did draft him in 2023. That was a reason to remember his name and pay attention to him. So was his power potential, though he came with big strikeout concerns.
Fabian has continued to strike out a lot as a professional, though he’s reduced that to “only” 28.3% – a high but survivable rate if there’s enough else going on – while batting .221/.332/.441. That’s basically Colton Cowser-type numbers, or at least it would be if he got an MLB chance and hit like that. He gets positive marks for center field defense, giving him more potential to hang around as a fourth outfielder.
Like all the other college players from this draft class, this is the Rule 5 decision year for the Orioles with Fabian. I wonder if he might get moved in a trade similar to what the Orioles did with Billy Cook last July. This is complicated by Fabian being on the injured list right now with a left wrist strain. The fact that Beavers has taken a step forward this year makes for a tougher path to playing time in Baltimore for Fabian.
The Nolan McLean thing
The Orioles used their third round pick on Nolan McLean, a pitcher from Oklahoma State. This was interesting at the time because it was the earliest that Mike Elias had used a pick on a pitcher. They did not sign McLean, apparently due to medical concerns. This meant the O’s got a compensation pick at the end of the third round in 2023. That pick was used on Arkansas outfielder Tavian Josenberger, about whom I won’t have much to say when I write about the 2023 class tomorrow.
In 2023, McLean was drafted again in the third round, this time by the Mets. He has looked like an interesting prospect in that system ever since, currently ranked #4 in their system by MLB Pipeline and as high as #2 at Baseball America. It would be nice if the Orioles had a starting pitcher in Triple-A who had a 2.80 ERA, 1.171 WHIP, and 9.1 K/9 in ten games.
Some people who are coveting contending teams pitching prospects in hopes that the O’s might be able to trade one of their veterans for such a player in the coming sell-off have identified McLean as a guy who’d be worth getting. Sure, but I wonder if the Orioles still have medical concerns. And also whether the Orioles have any veterans who the Mets would give up McLean to get.
Mike Elias will never admit to this, but I think that McLean’s contract falling through screwed up his plans for spreading out the draft bonus pool. The Orioles did not take any other “let’s give this guy an overslot bonus” players in rounds 4-10 of the draft. On day 3, they took several college juniors who appeared to want to go back for their senior seasons: South Carolina pitcher James Hicks, Vanderbilt infielder Carter Young, Miami pitcher Andrew Walters, and Richmond outfielder Alden Mathes.
Down to the signing deadline, it was unclear that any of these guys would sign. Young ultimately took the money, receiving a big overslot $1.325 million bonus. That seems to have been a good decision for him, as his pro performance is not leading him towards a further baseball payday. He’s OPSing .391 in 29 games so far this season. Walters was drafted by the Guardians in 2023, raced up to the MLB level by the end of last season, but had to undergo season-ending surgery for a torn lat after two games this year. They would have just been better off ignoring the medical flag and signing McLean.
One sentence about a bunch of other guys
Fourth-round pick Silas Ardoin was instantly pegged as a possible future backup catcher because he wasn’t likely to hit and he hasn’t hit (.632 OPS across three seasons in Double-A).
Fifth-round pick Trace Bright is sporting a 5.50 ERA and 1.490 WHIP with Double-A this season.
Eighth-round pick Cameron Weston is unique among Elias-drafted starting pitchers in that he has reached Triple-A and is not totally failing, though his 4.58 ERA and 1.424 WHIP aren’t all that interesting either.
Eleventh-round pick Zack Showalter, part of the trade price for Jack Flaherty in 2023, has a 5.52 ERA with 18 walks in 14.2 innings of relief in High-A this season.
Thirteenth-round pick Jared Beck, who has yet to make it above High-A due to struggling massively with command, is listed at seven feet tall.
Fourteenth-round pick Adam Retzbach is a C/1B/DH who is hitting .239/.346/.410 for Chesapeake this year, which isn’t great but also isn’t nothing.
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Jackson Holliday looks like he is going to be far and away the best player of any of the guys the Orioles might have considered at #1 in the Draft. That’s a win. It is true that we are still hoping for development into a perennial All-Star rather than seeing that kind of performance already. I like his chances.
Will anybody else from this class pay off for the Orioles? Hopes for that are pinned almost exclusively on Beavers, although if you look around hard enough you’ll find Fabian fans, Ardoin advocates, Weston welcomers, and even Retzbach recommenders. The Orioles really need to start getting some real prospects from outside of their first two picks in a given draft class. The next time this happens in the Elias era will be the first time.