The 2011 MLB Draft class is one of the best in the 20 drafts I’ve been involved with, between my time with the Blue Jays and the ones I’ve covered as a writer — and we all knew it at the time, with multiple players who had good cases to go first overall … none of whom was the player who was, in fact, the best prospect in the class. It seems like just yesterday that my Large Adult Son, Derek Law (9th round, 297th overall pick, 1.2 career WAR), heard his name called by the San Francisco Giants, but it’s been 10 years since this epic group of prospects hit the scene, and I don’t think we’ve seen a group of talent like this in any drafts since.
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This is a “redraft,” in which I try to reselect the top-30 picks based on what we know of the last 10 years and what I think these players might do for the remainder of their careers. I don’t include players who didn’t sign, and I don’t think about service time considerations (when you draft a player, you only control the first six-plus years of his career). I’m just going big picture here, and while I cite players’ Wins Above Replacement figures throughout (using Baseball-Reference), I didn’t just rank the players by their WAR totals; a few times, I deviated quite a bit from those rankings. There’s an age gap here of five years from the youngest player on the list (Francisco Lindor) to the oldest (Blake Treinen), which matters when we’re projecting forward for what these players might still do.
I’ll follow up with a column on the “misses” of the first round, although there were very few true whiffs that year. The first 28 players drafted (excluding one who didn’t sign) all reached the majors, and half of the first-rounders have accumulated at least 4 WAR in the majors so far.
1. Mookie Betts
Team: Pittsburgh Pirates
Player selected in 2011: Gerrit Cole
Betts’ actual selection: 5th round, 172nd overall pick (Boston)
Career WAR: 47.6
Betts is, for the most part, a great story of old-fashioned scouting: The Red Sox area scout in Tennessee at the time, Danny Watkins, believed in Betts’ athleticism, intelligence, and work ethic, pushing Boston to take him despite his small stature and relative inexperience playing baseball — he was also a star for his high school basketball team, and we all know what sort of bowler he is. Of the 171 players taken ahead of Betts in 2011, only one was listed at a height below his 5-foot-9: Kolten Wong, who was 5-7 (and probably still is) but had the advantage of three years of performance at the University of Hawai’i. The Red Sox did have some other input that favored Betts, including an early version of software that purported to measure hand-eye coordination. But having spoken to multiple people involved in the decision, I think it’s fair to say Betts wouldn’t have been a Red Sox player had it not been for the efforts of Watkins — something teams that have decided to do away with area scouts might want to keep in mind.
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Team: Seattle Mariners
Player selected in 2011: Danny Hultzen
Rendon’s actual selection: 1st round, 6th overall pick (Washington)
Career WAR: 32.3
Rendon was drafted in the 27th round by Atlanta out of high school, a superstar as a freshman at Rice, and a strong contender for the first-overall pick heading into his junior year, but a sore shoulder hampered his swing all season, allowing the Nationals to land him at the sixth pick. He’s off to a tough start this season with the Angels but was among the AL’s best players in 2020 and is still one of the best OBP guys in the majors.
3. Gerrit Cole
Team: Arizona Diamondbacks
Player selected in 2011: Trevor Bauer
Cole’s actual selection: 1st round, 1st overall pick (Pittsburgh)
Career WAR: 29.0
Cole was the best prospect in the class at the time, a right-hander with some of the best arm strength of any college starter in history to that point, hitting 101 mph for me against Arizona State that May, along with a plus slider and plus changeup, but bad pitch-calling by UCLA (especially overusing the fastball, to the point where hitters would start to cheat to catch up to it) and some immaturity on the mound hurt his results. He grew up, of course, and has improved his understanding of how to use all those weapons, too.
4. Francisco Lindor
Team: Baltimore Orioles
Player selected in 2011: Dylan Bundy
Lindor’s actual selection: 1st round, 8th overall pick (Cleveland)
Career WAR: 28.6
Lindor should have gone higher, but he was pushed down by some of the bigger names from the college ranks and some bogus stories that he was going to Seattle (at 2) or Kansas City (at 5), which I think led other teams to look elsewhere in the belief that he’d be off the board. He was one of the youngest players in the class, with plus-plus makeup and all the tools except power, which, as it turned out, came in time.
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5. George Springer
Team: Kansas City Royals
Player selected in 2011: Bubba Starling
Springer’s actual selection: 1st round, 11th overall pick (Houston)
Career WAR: 27.9
Bobby Heck did a … well, a hell of a job for the Astros, with this his penultimate draft as scouting director. Springer was one of the toolsiest college position players in recent memory and had a history of performance, but a relatively high strikeout rate for the time and the lack of a two-strike approach caused some concerns for teams drafting in the top 10. Heck pounced at pick 11, one of several selections he made that helped the franchise win its first-ever World Series in 2017.
6. Javier Báez
Team: Washington Nationals
Player selected in 2011: Anthony Rendon
Báez’s actual selection: 1st round, 9th overall pick (Chicago Cubs)
Career WAR: 20.8
Báez was the high-risk, high-upside guy of this draft, with unbelievable bat speed, huge raw power, an unclear position (some teams wanted him to catch, and no one was sure he could stay at shortstop), and sketchy comments about his makeup that I will always believe were connected to his ethnicity. Báez had swag, but it isn’t bragging if you can bring it. He swung hard all the time, and in many ways, he was the high school version of Springer in this class; I actually saw both guys fall completely to their back knees on swings and misses while they were prospects. Javy can be maddening, and the erosion of his plate discipline is a huge concern, but he’s blessed with too much ability to assume this is all he’ll ever be.
7. Trevor Story
Team: Arizona Diamondbacks
Player selected in 2011: Archie Bradley
Story’s actual selection: 1st supplemental round, 45th overall pick (Colorado)
Career WAR: 23.2
Fun if irrelevant story about Story: I tried to see him in high school, doubling up after another game, but got caught in Metroplex traffic, missing the game only to find out later that he’d walked four times and done nothing else. Like most Rockies hitters, he’s had a huge home/road split in his career, but he’s hit for power away from Coors and he’s been a plus defender at a key position.
8. Trevor Bauer
Team: Cleveland
Player selected in 2011: Francisco Lindor
Bauer’s actual selection: 1st round, 3rd overall pick (Arizona)
Career WAR: 20.1
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Bauer won the NL Cy Young last year, but it was really just his second above-average year as a starter — although he’s well on his way to a third this season; if he keeps this up, it’ll be his best season by far. Bauer had the far better stat line than his teammate Cole at UCLA, and he was more advanced as a pitcher at that point, without Cole’s untapped potential. Bauer’s path to the majors might have been faster and smoother had he not been taken by a Diamondbacks organization that was unprepared to work with him in just about any way, although even in his first year in Cleveland after Arizona traded him, he walked 89 batters in 138 1/3 innings between Triple A and the majors.
9. Marcus Semien
Team: Chicago Cubs
Player selected in 2011: Javier Báez
Semien’s actual selection: 6th round, 201st overall pick (Chicago White Sox)
Career WAR: 24.8
Semien can thank Ron Washington for so much of his career; he was a bad defensive shortstop as an amateur at Cal and up through the minors until he went to Oakland and became a plus defender by working with Wash.
10. Kyle Hendricks
Team: San Diego Padres
Player selected in 2011: Cory Spangenberg
Hendricks’s actual selection: 8th round, 264th overall pick (Texas)
Career WAR: 20.8
Hendricks is a unicorn — extreme control guys with fringy stuff often get crushed in the majors, but he lives on the edges of the strike zone, and when he gives up contact, it’s often weak. Texas took him from a small liberal-arts college in New Hampshire called Dartmouth, and he’s become the best MLB alumnus in the school’s history, beating out Jim Beattie and Mike Remlinger, the only other Big Green players to amass 10 WAR in the majors.
11. Sonny Gray
Team: Houston Astros
Player selected in 2011: George Springer
Gray’s actual selection: 1st round, 18th overall pick (Oakland)
Career WAR: 20.6
Gray might have been a first-rounder out of high school, even with his short stature working against him, but he was unsignable anyway due to his Vanderbilt commitment and marked himself as a potential top-10 pick when he was hitting 98 for the Commodores as a freshman. However, he was a little less consistent when he became a full-time starter, allowing Oakland to land him at the 18th pick. The A’s got him to change how he used his fastball, convincing him to work down in the zone more so he’d be less homer-prone. But over the last few years, he’s become a more complete pitcher, using his whole repertoire — with a sinker and a four-seamer among them — to be an above-average starter for the Reds.
12. Tyler Glasnow
Team: Milwaukee Brewers
Player selected in 2011: Taylor Jungmann
Glasnow’s actual selection: 5th round, 152nd overall pick (Pittsburgh)
Career WAR: 4.0
Glasnow has produced 1.7 career WAR, or nearly half his career total, in his 12 starts so far this season, and all of his positive career value since the start of 2019, a function of frequent injuries and his lack of development while he was still with Pittsburgh, the team that drafted him. He does look like he’s about to go on a run of highly productive years, with some 5-WAR seasons sprinkled in, as long as he can stay healthy enough for 25-30 starts a year, which would give him a good chance to pass all the players I have below him and perhaps end up a top-10 player in the class.
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13. Jackie Bradley Jr.
Team: New York Mets
Player selected in 2011: Brandon Nimmo
Bradley’s actual selection: 1st supplemental round, 40th overall pick (Boston)
Career WAR: 18.0
Bradley was supposed to be a first-rounder after his freshman year at South Carolina and subsequent summer on Cape Cod, but a tendon injury in his left wrist ruined his junior year and allowed the Red Sox to grab him with their fourth pick, all of which were among the top 40. JBJ has been a valuable player thanks to his defense, but his offense has been below-average more than it’s been above it, and I’ve always thought he’d be a more productive hitter if he eschewed power for contact, which is closer to the player he was in college. That ship may have sailed, but he should play well into his 30s thanks to his glove.
14. Kolten Wong
Team: Miami Marlins
Player selected in 2011: José Fernández
Wong’s actual selection: 1st round, 22nd overall pick (St. Louis)
Career WAR: 18.1
I wasn’t wild about Wong as a prospect in 2011, as he never ran as well as advertised and wasn’t a great defensive second baseman at the time, but he improved substantially with the glove in pro ball to the point that about 5 of those 18 career WAR are attributable to his glove. He doesn’t hit left-handed pitching well and probably never will at this point, but as a platoon second baseman who can also be a late-game defensive replacement, he should continue to be valuable into his mid-30s. I was way off on this one.
15. Kevin Pillar
Team: Milwaukee Brewers
Player selected in 2011: Jed Bradley
Pillar’s actual selection: 32nd round, 979th overall pick (Toronto)
Career WAR: 16.0
Pillar is all glove — FanGraphs has him worth about 35 runs above average in his career on defense, so despite a .299 career OBP, he’s been worth 16 WAR per Baseball-Reference and 13 per FanGraphs. He is by far the best player ever to come out of Division II Cal State-Dominguez Hills, with none of the other three alumni to appear in the majors amassing more than 28 games played or 0.2 WAR.
16. Mike Clevinger
Team: Los Angeles Dodgers
Player selected in 2011: Chris Reed
Clevinger’s actual selection: 4th round, 135th overall pick (LA Angels)
Career WAR: 13.3
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Clevinger started his college career at the Citadel but transferred to Seminole State College of Florida, then a junior college, from which the Angels and longtime scout Tom Kotchman took him in the fourth round. It was a slow climb up the minors for Clevinger, as elbow reconstruction surgery wiped out half of 2012 and almost all of 2013, but he reached the majors five years after the draft — and after a trade for Vinnie Pestano, who was definitely a real pitcher and not a character in “The Irishman,” sent him to Cleveland. He started to find a real out pitch in his slider in 2017, after reaching the majors, and by 2020 was throwing it almost a third of the time. He’s out until next year after Tommy John surgery, unfortunately.
17. Blake Snell
Team: Los Angeles Angels
Player selected in 2011: C.J. Cron
Snell’s actual selection: 1st supplemental round, 52nd overall pick (Tampa Bay)
Career WAR: 10.6
Snell came into 2021 with 11.1 career WAR, but things haven’t gone as planned for the former Cy Young Award winner in San Diego, as he’s walked 13 more batters this season than he did in 2020 in three fewer innings. The Rays made the bizarre decision to go heavy on high school prospects from the Pacific Northwest in 2010-11, whiffing on Josh Sale, Drew Vettleson, Ryan Brett and Ian Kendall in the 2010 draft, and then reaching for Josh Ames in this 2011 draft, a year when Tampa Bay had 12 selections in the first 90 overall picks and had only one success to show for it in Snell. Seven of those 12 picks never even saw the majors, and the best of the rest, Mikie Mahtook, has 0.3 career WAR to his credit. Without Snell, it might have been the worst draft class any team had ever had, considering the expected values of all of those picks.
18. José Fernández
Team: Oakland Athletics
Player selected in 2011: Sonny Gray
Fernández’s actual selection: 1st round, 14th overall pick (Miami)
Career WAR: 14.2
What might have been. Fernández was worth 6 wins his rookie year and about four and a half in his first full year back from Tommy John surgery. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think he’d be up there with Cole and Rendon on this redraft had he not died in September of 2016 at age 24.
19. Brandon Nimmo
Team: Boston Red Sox
Player selected in 2011: Matt Barnes
Nimmo’s actual selection: 1st round, 13th overall pick (NY Mets)
Career WAR: 9.4
Nimmo was a risky pick at 13, a Wyoming high schooler who played on a travel-ball team because there’s no high school baseball in his state and who’d already had knee surgery that was still hobbling him somewhat in his draft spring. It’s worked out, though, as Nimmo has had a superb career to date when healthy, with a .267/.401/.462 career line against right-handed pitching, with the Mets giving him some at-bats against lefties but soft-platooning him so that 76 percent of his career PA are against right-handed pitching. He’s only played one full injury-free season back in 2018, as well as staying healthy in the truncated 2020 campaign. This has really turned out to be a strong pick, even though I think a lot of Mets fans didn’t like it at the time.
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20. Michael Fulmer
Team: Colorado Rockies
Player selected in 2011: Tyler Anderson
Fulmer’s actual selection: 2nd round, 44th overall pick (NY Mets)
Career WAR: 9.4
The Mets had a great draft in 2011, although one of their top two picks never played a game for the big-league club. Fulmer was their second-rounder, one of four Oklahoma high school pitchers to go in the top two rounds that year (Dylan Bundy, Archie Bradley, and Adrian Houser were the others), on the basis of big velocity and a hammer curveball. The Mets shipped him off for two months of Yoenis Céspedes at the 2015 trade deadline, getting two wins of value from the outfielder before re-signing him to a long-term deal, while Fulmer won the AL Rookie of the Year award the next year for the Tigers. He’s back now after Tommy John surgery cost him all of 2019 and has been dominant since moving to the bullpen full-time at the start of May.
21. Joe Musgrove
Team: Toronto Blue Jays
Player selected in 2011: Tyler Beede (did not sign)
Musgrove’s actual selection: 1st round supplemental, 46th overall pick (Toronto)
Career WAR: 5.8
Musgrove has been around, as he was first drafted by Toronto, then traded to Houston and then to Pittsburgh and most recently to San Diego. He has changed substantially as a pitcher over his career, especially in the last three years, to the point where he appears to be just starting his prime now, even as most pitchers on this list are either well into their primes or even past them.
22. Dylan Bundy
Team: St. Louis Cardinals
Player selected in 2011: Kolten Wong
Bundy’s actual selection: 1st round, 4th overall pick (Baltimore)
Career WAR: 8.9
If Bundy were 6-3, rather than a generous 6-1, he might have been the first high school right-hander to go first overall. He had all of the ingredients — he’d pitched over the summer and dominated even as an underclassman, he had arm strength, he had secondary pitches (including a vicious cutter), and he had a good delivery with a great workout routine that seemed to give him a shot at durability. He was horribly overworked in high school, however, and after Bundy had Tommy John surgery and ensuing shoulder problems, Buck Showalter worked him even harder in 2017, and Bundy seemed like he’d never recover. He remade himself as a finesse guy in 2020, finishing 9th in the majors in FIP, and while he’s been too homer-prone this season, there’s at least some hope he can have a second act as an innings guy, even if his No. 1 starter ceiling is long gone.
23. Nick Ahmed
Team: Washington Nationals
Player selected in 2011: Alex Meyer
Ahmed’s actual selection: 2nd round, 85th overall pick (Atlanta)
Career WAR: 12.2
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Ahmed’s WAR is system-dependent — FanGraphs only has him at 5.6 for his career — because they disagree on the value of his defense. He is a superb defensive shortstop with a plus arm, strong enough that I thought he’d have a chance to pitch if he couldn’t hit, and he’s come into enough power to make himself a second-division regular for a while. He has a career OBP of .292, however, and has been pitched around a fair amount by batting 7th or 8th so much of his career.
24. Zach Davies
Team: Tampa Bay Rays
Player selected in 2011: Taylor Guerrieri
Davies’s actual selection: 26th round, 785th overall pick (Baltimore)
Career WAR: 9.7
Davies has had a heck of a career for a 26th-rounder, with 134 major-league starts and three seasons of at least 2 WAR so far, a great job of scouting by area scout John Gillette, whom the Orioles let go in 2019 and who hasn’t been able to latch on with another team because 10 clubs have outsourced their scouting to the Simulmatics Corporation.
25. Anthony DeSclafani
Team: San Diego Padres
Player selected in 2011: Joe Ross
DeSclafani’s actual selection: 6th round, 199th overall pick (Toronto)
Career WAR: 7.3
The Florida Gators’ roster in 2011 featured former first-rounder Karsten Whitson, 2012 supplemental first-rounder Brian Johnson, 2013 first-rounder Jonathan Crawford, and control artist Hudson Randall, but DeSclafani has had a better career than anyone else on the staff, even though he worked almost exclusively in relief that spring. He’s also improved as he’s gone along in the majors, going from fastball-heavy with Toronto to the sinker/slider guy we see now — and now that he’s fully healthy, he looks like he has a few solid years as a starter ahead of him, too.
26. C.J. Cron
Team: Boston Red Sox
Player selected in 2011: Blake Swihart
Cron’s actual selection: 1st round, 17th overall pick (LA Angels)
Career WAR: 8.1
Cron was all bat — he was a catcher at the University of Utah, and on Cape Cod, but it was sort of in name only — when the Angels took him in the first round, which was a peculiar choice since they’d just signed Albert Pujols to a 10-year contract and Cron wasn’t really the best player available at the pick. He’s had a serviceable career as a lefty-mashing first baseman/DH, bouncing around several teams because his low-average/high-power skill set is relatively easy to find right now.
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27. Matt Barnes
Team: Cincinnati Reds
Player selected in 2011: Robert Stephenson
Barnes’s actual selection: 1st round, 19th overall pick (Boston)
Career WAR: 4.5
I always say that relievers don’t last and that predicting their performance is difficult, but if you want a counterexample, Barnes is a pretty good one: He had four straight seasons of 60+ innings in relief, with FIPs of 3.72 or better, all above replacement level, heading into 2020, and in 2021 is off to maybe his best start ever. Of course, relievers don’t last, and they’re not predictable. I’m OK betting on Barnes to keep this rolling a few more years, though.
28. Archie Bradley
Team: Atlanta
Player selected in 2011: Sean Gilmartin
Bradley’s actual selection: 1st round, 7th overall pick (Arizona)
Career WAR: 5.2
Arizona took Bradley with the pick they got for failing to agree to terms with Barret Loux, who flunked his post-draft physical the year before; MLB made Loux a free agent, and he signed with Texas but struggled badly once he got to Triple A and eventually required surgery from which he never fully returned. Bradley, meanwhile, never did find a good third pitch to stay a starter. But he has been very good in relief for the last four years.
29. Travis Shaw
Team: San Francisco Giants
Player selected in 2011: Joe Panik
Shaw’s actual selection: 9th round, 292nd overall pick (Boston)
Career WAR: 9.4
Shaw has had a solid career for a platoon player — he can’t hit lefties at all, with a career .226/.287/.390 line — who has never been great at any defensive position, making up for it with versatility and big power against right-handers. He went to the Brewers in the ill-fated trade that brought Tyler Thornburg to Boston, only for Thornburg to go under the knife almost immediately and throw just 42 innings for the Red Sox with a 6.54 ERA.
30. Blake Treinen
Team: Minnesota Twins
Player selected in 2011: Levi Michael
Treinen’s actual selection: 7th round, 226th overall pick (Oakland)
Career WAR: 7.9
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Treinen went to South Dakota State and was the second Jackrabbits player selected (two years after Caleb Thielbar) after the program moved up to Division I in the spring of 2008. He’s still just the fifth SDSU alum to reach the majors and second on the team’s WAR rankings, behind Vean Gregg, a pitcher who played from 1911 to 1918, spent a few years out of baseball and a few more in the Pacific Coast League, then returned to the majors for 74 1/3 innings in 1925. Anyway, Treinen wasn’t just notable for where he went to school — he’s the rare fifth-year senior who made good, as the Marlins took him in the 23rd round in 2010 but voided their deal after the post-draft physical. SDSU was actually his third school after stints at Arkansas and at NAIA Baker University. And he signed for just $52,500, which I believe is the lowest bonus of anyone on this list by a good margin.
(Top photo of Mookie Betts: Harry How / Getty Images)
