If you’re good enough, they’ll find a place for you. Nick Loftin and Connor Phillips are plenty good enough.
Loftin, Baylor’s sterling junior shortstop, and Phillips, a hotshot freshman pitcher at McLennan Community College, should realize a dream by hearing their names called in this week’s Major League Draft. Even with MLB shortening the process to five rounds and 160 total picks, these two prospects boast too much talent to be left out of the mix.
The draft starts Wednesday with the first round, and 37 players will come off the board the first day, including the compensation picks. Rounds 2-5 of the draft are Thursday.
Loftin could give the Bears a first-round pick for the second straight year. Last year, Baylor catcher Shea Langeliers went No. 9 overall to the Atlanta Braves while third baseman Davis Wendzel was the 41st overall pick by the Texas Rangers. Baseball America ranks Loftin as the 29th-best draft-eligible prospect and MLB.com listed him at No. 36 overall. If he falls in line with those rankings, that would make Loftin a late first-round selection.
The Athletic recently declared Loftin “one of the safest bets in the draft” and a “definite major leaguer” because of his steady play. Baylor coach Steve Rodriguez said one of Loftin’s most attractive qualities as a pro prospect is his ability to avoid strikeouts. He fanned just 48 times in 510 career at-bats for the Bears.
“Offensively, he does some things that are probably better than anybody else in the country, which is something that really piques their interest,” Rodriguez said. “It’s called the whiff rate, which is his lack of ability to swing and miss. I want to say it’s around eight or nine percent, where last year guys in the first round were at 15 percent. So he does some things when he swings the bat, chances are he’s not going to swing and miss. Those are things that they start to look at.”
Loftin hit .316 in his 121-game career at Baylor with 114 runs scored, a .374 on-base percentage, 34 doubles, 14 home runs and 92 RBIs. Big 12 coaches named him as the conference’s Preseason Player of the Year going into the 2020 season, and he was off to a nice start, hitting .321 in 13 games when the coronavirus halted play.
As a freshman out of Corpus Christi Ray in 2018, Loftin started out in the outfield before eventually taking over for Tucker Cascadden at shortstop. He’s rangy and athletic enough that a pro club could plug him into any one of a number of holes, and it wouldn’t be an uncomfortable fit.
“He’s unbelievably versatile. He can play a lot of different positions,” Rodriguez said. “I think he played five or six different positions with Team USA. He can also pitch if needed, which I don’t think is going to be a factor into their decision. … The traditional question of, can he play short at the next level is kind of irrelevant. But I tell (scouts), absolutely he can. He’s played at the highest level in college, why wouldn’t he be able to play in minor league baseball as well?”
As for MCC’s Phillips, he was tabbed as the No. 1 junior college draft prospect by Perfect Game before the 2020 season ever began. That’s not unfamiliar territory for the Highlanders, who had another top-ranked prospect in catcher Josh Breaux back in 2018. Breaux went 61st overall to the New York Yankees that year. MCC coach Mitch Thompson thinks Phillips will likely be taken early on Day 2 of this year’s draft.
“He’s young (19 years old) and he’s really athletic,” Thompson said. “Physically, he’s a young guy, so much so that the scouts have evaluated him against the other high school prospects rather than lining him up against the college players. He’s going through the maturing process on and off the field. But he’s a really talented arm. When you throw it in there 94 to 98 miles an hour, those guys don’t grow on trees.”
Indeed, the 6-foot-2 right-hander out of Magnolia West High School possesses special zing and pop with his fastball. MLB.com noted that he has the ability to maintain that velocity deep into games. In his limited time with MCC, Phillips rolled up a 3-1 record with a 3.16 ERA in six starts, with 27 strikeouts and 15 walks in 25.2 innings. Each of those starts was well-attended by pro scouts, too.
That age-old baseball characteristic of “signability” could come into play with Phillips. He turned down offers of third-round money in 2019 in order to enroll at MCC. Should he for some reason drop into a lower slot in the draft than he wants, Phillips could always return to the Highlanders for the 2021 season and be eligible for the draft again. That gives him leverage. “He’s a guy with some options,” Thompson said.
A former pro scout himself, Thompson has an open line of communication to that world. He surmised that two other MCC players have a shot to be taken this year – infielders Brett Squires and Jalen Battles, based on the conversations he’s had with scouts this spring. Thompson thinks Squires – who hit .338 with eight home runs in 21 games in 2020 – could go toward the end of fourth or fifth round, while Battles may be a longer shot but still has the potential to get picked.
“It should be fun,” Thompson said. “Typically in the top 10 rounds in any given year, you may get five to 10 total JUCO guys taken. If we had a couple of guys in the top five rounds, that would be pretty special.”
—WACOTRIB