Anthony Molina would be an interesting upside pick. He was a legit 1-1 candidate a few years back for this draft but character concerns have destroyed his draft stock. Some team will take the flier although I'm not sure if it'll be us.
http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/03/28/book-excerpt-the-arm-jeff-passan-tommy-john-surgery
At a baseball tournament on his 15th birthday, Anthony Molina threw a fastball clocked at 91 mph. About a year later, before the state of Florida allowed him to drive a car by himself, the Somerset Academy sophomore faced shortstop Milton Ramos in a high school game. Ramos was a future $650,000 bonus baby of the Mets, and a gaggle of scouts watched from behind a chain-link fence. Radar guns steadied, Molina threw the ball as fast as few other 16-year-olds ever have. Every reading said 95 mph except the one on the Mets scout’s gun. His said 96.
Scouts are inveterate gossips, and word of this flamethrower from the Miami suburb of Pembroke Pines quickly circulated through the baseball world. It was May 2014, and I was looking for a high schooler who threw hard and could illustrate the peril his gift posed. I asked a scout friend, figuring he would pass along a junior, someone from the class of 2015. Instead he mentioned a member of the class of ’16: “There’s a kid named Anthony Molina. Created a lot of buzz already.”
Even better, Molina had received an invitation to the 2014 Perfect Game National Showcase in Fort Myers, Fla., one of the most important events on the amateur baseball calendar. I had already planned on traveling to the showcase, a gathering of talent that draws scouts, executives and coaches from across the country. Another scout friend described it as “a cattle call where the cows pay $200 to be there.” Perfect Game, a company based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that hosted elite tournaments in addition to showcases, was a running joke—gallows humor, really, because some people believed it was killing the sport.
Among baseball people, lusting after a high school sophomore used to be a no-no. Too much could happen by his draft year. Perfect Game helped legitimize and monetize the hunger for outstanding youth players. One of Perfect Game’s partners, a company called Skillshow, which makes glossy highlight videos for high school athletes, handed out a flyer at the Fort Myers showcase that read, “Due to the increased availability of information in the computer age, the recruiting process is beginning much earlier than ever before. College coaches are starting to identify prospective recruits as early as seventh and eighth grade!”
During Molina’s ninth-grade season Miami offered him a full scholarship. He accepted, though it was just a backup plan, because arms like Molina’s are worth seven figures to major league teams. The first 55 picks of the 2015 draft were all offered signing bonuses of at least $1 million. If Anthony Molina was hitting 95 mph as a 6'5", 175-pound sophomore, his fully grown self might hit triple digits. The last righthanded high school pitcher to throw 100 mph was a Texan named Tyler Kolek. The Marlins drafted him second overall in ’14 and paid him $6 million to sign.
The Perfect Game nationals, at Fort Myers’s JetBlue Park, spring training home of the Red Sox, kicked off showcase season with aplomb. A military-grade radar system tracked every pitch to the 10th of a mile per hour and broadcast it on the scoreboard. Molina’s first pitch, a 92-mph fastball, was returned up the middle for a single. The hits kept coming—a single, a double, another double—and suddenly all the 92s and 93s looked middling. Scouts scribbled notes, undeterred; they figured Molina would hit the next year’s nationals and fare just fine—maybe with 96s and 97s.
Halfway up the first base line Nelson and Olivia Molina feared something was wrong. Nelson inspects homes for a living; Olivia has spent nearly three decades as a secretary for Carnival Cruise Lines. They are both Cuban immigrants. When their son trudged into the stands after his game, they were concerned. “Your arm good?” Nelson asked.
Anthony nodded. Olivia wanted more than a nod. “How’s your arm?” she asked. Anthony sat down. “It’s all right,” he said, and she started massaging his back.
A man named Roger Tomas approached. “Arm all right?” he asked. Tomas is Anthony Molina’s adviser, a code word for agent. His duty is to deliver a healthy right arm to the draft in June 2016.
Molina seemed to have been doing this forever. At 13 he played a tournament at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. He was 6'4" and could dunk a basketball. Olivia had to take his birth certificate everywhere to prove his age. Around that point, he said, “I just started blowing it by kids, and kid after kid would just walk back to the dugout with eyes wide open.”
Anthony Molina was baseball’s evolutionary archetype, the product of a system that fetishizes the next big thing. Perfect Game posts national player rankings for every age group starting with freshmen in high school. “Kids obsess over the rankings,” Nelson Molina said. Even after his 2014 performance at nationals, Anthony Molina was the No. 1 player in the class of 2016.
“He has no clue how talented he is,” said Richie Palmer, his coach with Elite Squad, a Miami-area high-level travel team. “He doesn’t realize he can be a multimillionaire in a couple of years.”
Anthony Molina’s name more or less disappeared from the site late in 2015. His ascent had been fraught with peril in the first place. As a freshman he went to West Broward High, near Pembroke Pines; then he transferred to American Heritage, a local powerhouse, but got kicked out after he was caught with $15 worth of weed. (He said he was just holding it for a friend.) After spending his sophomore season at Somerset Academy, a charter school, he returned to West Broward for his junior year. But after school on Jan. 13, 2015, Molina punched a kid in the face and blackened his eye. The kid called it a cheap shot. Molina, then 17, said it was self-defense. That evening police officers came to his house and arrested him, and he spent the night in detention. The next morning he was charged with aggravated battery, a felony. He cried. So did his mother, Olivia.
“I see two versions of Tony,” said Palmer, his travel-ball coach. “I see the great kid with me. And I see the f---up. It has nothing to do with the arm and everything to do with character.”
Six months earlier, at nationals, all that mattered was the arm. Before Molina pitched, he was handed a sheet of blank mailing labels and sent to a table in the empty concourse. He used red, blue, green and purple pens to sign dozens of labels that would be pressed onto limited-edition trading cards made by Leaf for Perfect Game. Each card is emblazoned with a number. For $29.99 on eBay anyone could have a gold-bordered, autographed Anthony Molina card—number 37 of 50—with an out-of-focus picture of him from nationals.
“I deal with five Anthony Molinas every summer,” Palmer said. “I try to tell him, ‘You’re not special,’ even though he can be. I’ve seen guys like him throw it away. And that’s the path he’s going on.”
Nelson Molina expected the phone call. It was the spring of 2015, and on the line was a coach from Miami. He was pulling Anthony’s scholarship offer. But Nelson never stopped sticking up for his son. The marijuana episode “was a misunderstanding,” he said, and the school transfers were “not a big deal.”
Molina took a few months away from baseball, and when he came back, his grades were up. He was practicing with Elite Squad again, even as his lawyer, Lyon Greenblatt, planned his defense. In June the charges were dropped altogether, according to Greenblatt and Nelson Molina, and back went Anthony into the full grind of showcase ball.
Though scouts nattered away about Molina’s bad makeup, the episode did little to diminish his standing in elite showcase events. Under Armour had invited him back to its All-America Game, alongside Pint. And of course Perfect Game expected him to show up at nationals. His fastball there sat 89 to 94 mph. The extra velocity never came, not after 27 Perfect Game events and not this spring as he angled to find a team that would bet on his potential.
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Heres a tweet about him from a couple of weeks ago:
PBR Florida @PBRFlorida May 28
2016 RHP Anthony Molina comes in for the South team and is sitting 90-92, touching 93 with a solid 71-73 mph CB. Pounding zone. #mlbdraft
as well as Austin Bergner, highly touted a few years back, he ranked in at 200 on MLB Pipelines draft list.
Scouting Grades: Fastball: 60 | Curve: 50 | Changeup: 45 | Control: 50 | Overall: 45
On the prospect radar for a while, Bergner had shown very good stuff on a big stage for two years, including strong performances on the summer showcase circuit and for Team USA in 2015. A combination of an unorthodox delivery, an inconsistent spring that included missing time at the end of the season and a strong commitment to North Carolina put a large dent in his Draft stock.
Tall and projectable, there might be more to Bergner's fastball in the future. It typically sits in the low 90s, but he has touched the mid 90s in the past. He can combine it with a good breaking ball that has good, tight spin at times. He doesn't go to his changeup too often, but he does have one, and given his overall feel for pitching, he should be able to develop an effective offspeed pitch in time. Bergner stays around the strike zone, though some are concerned about his funky arm action and delivery, even if it has been effective for the right-hander in the past and adds deception.
Bergner has a good arm, a feel for pitching, and some projectability. A team that feels comfortable with his delivery might still be willing to roll the dice, though the price tag to sign him way from becoming a Tar Heel might be too steep.
Some team will take a flyer on Jesus Luzardo, who had TJS in March, but has some upside:
Luzardo had established himself as perhaps the most advanced pitchability high school lefty in the Draft class last summer and teams were initially excited when he broke out of the gate getting his fastball up to the mid-90s. The enthusiasm was tempered quickly when Luzardo blew out his elbow and needed Tommy John surgery.
It's possible the physically mature 6-foot-1 southpaw was overthrowing, leading to the elbow injury. Over the summer, he was comfortably touching 93 mph and sitting in the 89-91 mph range. It played up thanks to its good sinking action and how well Luzardo commands it. He can change speeds on his curveball well and has a very good feel for a changeup.
Despite the surgery, there was buzz that Luzardo was still very much on teams' radars, as many don't shy away from those who have had surgery, signing them and then rehabbing them with professional staff. He does have a commitment to Miami, but with chances of him going in the first few rounds, he may never set foot on campus.
He wanted a chance to play with Vlad Jr.