The Minnesota Twins selected 17 pitchers and 13 position players on Day 3 of the MLB Draft, including right-handed pitcher Seth Halvorsen from Heritage Christian High School in Maple Grove.
“Probably a tough sign at this point,” said Twins scouting director Sean Johnson when asked if he’ll enter the organization or go to college. “We’ll have to come up with some money that we may or not have later in the summer. But probably not.”
Halvorsen is likely headed to the University of Missouri, where he aspires to be a two-way player. The Twins see him as a pitcher long-term, and he likely would have gone in the first 10 rounds had teams around the league thought he would have gone pro.
Draft picks are at a premium, especially in a league where cost control is vital to success, and Minnesota had already dealt their third-round pick, No. 74, to the San Diego Padres in the Phil Hughes deal. They’re certain they will sign the vast majority of the players they selected in the past three days, including all of the players they took on June 4-5 — the first 10 rounds of the draft.
“Thirty-two of 39 are expected to sign,” said Johnson. “Usually give yourself a few backup plans in case something doesn’t work out or guys change their minds.”
Oregon State outfielder Trevor Larnach was Minnesota’s first selection, at No. 20 overall. Tyler Webb, a center fielder out of the University of Memphis was their final choice at No. 1,204. In between, the Twins chose 20 pitchers and 19 position players. Twenty-nine were from college, including six from the first 10 rounds, and one was from Puerto Rico.
Nine of them were from the Midwest, including two from Ohio, Nebraska and Illinois, respectfully, and one was from Plover, Wis. Johnson did not think these players were any more likely to sign, however, than the players who came from typical Sunbelt locations like California, Florida or Texas.
“I don’t think we gave it any weight in our process,” said Johnson. “Most of these guys want to sign, or not, and we take them in certain rounds because of that.”
None of those players were Luke Heimlich, a convicted child molester and Lanarch’s teammate, who went undrafted despite being a potential first-round talent.
“We made a decision as an organization to not select him,” said Johnson, directing any further questions to chief baseball officer Derek Falvey. “I would say straight up, last year he would have gone the end of the first round, probably 25-40, if I had to guess.
“We discussed it as a group, and looked at all sides of the thing and tried to make a good decision. And that’s the one we made.”
Falvey installed Johnson as the scouting director last season, and had to scramble to implement his methods after being hired in October of 2016. Now they feel they have their people in place and have refined their process.
“We had so many changes just in our organization from top to bottom and by the time the draft rolled around we were kind of adapting on the fly and trying new things,” said Johnson. “We didn’t want to overwhelm the scouting group with all the information, and we’ve introduced a little bit more to the decision-making process.
“We’re already thinking about how do we change things in next year’s process to make it even better. … We’ll go back and do a deep dive on what we this week and what did we do wrong and what do we do going forward. The slow integration is kind of how we’ve done it and the scouts are taking to it very well.”
The Twins scouting department used TrackMan technology to address some of their blind spots from last season.
“You don’t get TrackMan data for free, so we’ve spent more money in our budget to pay for those services and get that data,” said Johnson. “And apply it — that’s the no. 1 thing. We have tremendously talented people in that group that did a great job and infused it into the process.
“And we had a brand new computer system that has all the data stored. We have a place to house it all. So our developers are just out-of-this-world awesome. They’ve changed the way we do a lot of our work, and our computers, having all that information at the click of a button [is] invaluable.”
TrackMan analytics influenced Minnesota’s first two picks on Day 3 of the draft: Michael Helman (11th round, Texas A&M) and Jon Olsen (12th, UCLA).
“Helman, that was another from our analytics team. We merged some visuals from his performance and some things he does, and we were glad to get him to lead off the day,” said Johnson. “Jon Olsen, he’s had Tommy John surgery already, we liked a lot of stuff from his TrackMan results. We know the makeup very well. Our area scout, Seth Moir, used to be the director of operations at UCLA, so we know the kid extremely well.”
But TrackMan did not influence all of Minnesota’s selections. Anthony Hoopii-Tuionetoa, a right-handed pitcher out of Baldwin High School in Hawaii, wasn’t heavily scouted.
“We got a kid from Maui, so that was exciting,” Johnson said, smiling. “We had a few shots of video, he wasn’t scouted very heavily. And we have a pitching assessment that we do on all these pitchers that we take from a risk standpoint; that’s one of Derek’s things that he’s brought.
“We have a handful of guys assigned to watch video. So we threw him through our shredder last night, and saw some things we liked in his delivery. Regi Grace (10th round) is one of the same guys from that standpoint. He’s got a delivery foundation that we want to see in pitchers, and that kind of gave us some confidence to take those guys.”
The Twins have had mixed results with the draft recently, which has often been their lifeblood by necessity as a mid-market team. Time will tell if the more analytical methods of the Falvine regime will pay off, but after three days of drafting, the Twins feel they have more than 30 players that will enter their system in the near future.
