The Detroit Tigers for the fifth time in six seasons will make a top five draft pick when the 2023 MLB draft gets underway Sunday evening in Seattle.
The Tigers have the third overall pick and are expected to select from a trio of candidates depending on whoever is available: Florida outfielder Wyatt Langford, LSU pitcher Paul Skenes or LSU outfielder and Golden Spikes winner Dylan Crews.
At the same time Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris, assistant general manager Rob Metzler and vice president of player development Ryan Garko were making their final tabulations Sunday morning, three of the club’s previous top-five picks − Riley Greene, Casey Mize and Spencer Torkelson − were in the clubhouse at Comerica Park.
It was just a few years ago they were on the other side of draft night, and although Torkelson is yet to play 200 games, Greene is yet to play 150 and Mize is yet to make 40 starts, talking about that evening still feels like a trip down memory lane.
“Man, it feels like a long time ago now, but I still have some great memories from that night,” Mize said Sunday. “I mean for me we were still playing. The draft now is in July so the college season is over, but we had just won a regional in North Carolina vs. NC State and so we left Raleigh that morning − the draft was a Monday – and we went back to Auburn with the whole team.
“But yeah, with the team, friends and family, that’s what stands out, everybody I was able to share it with.”
Same goes for Greene.
A recent high school graduate, Greene remembers he tried to keep the day relatively simple. He had a normal wake up time, then hit his gym routine in the morning before he chilled at the house in the afternoon, because he knew if he thought about it all day he would “be a mess.”
It was about an hour or so before draft time he and his family made their way to a banquet hall they’d rented out in his hometown of Oviedo, Florida.
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“There was only supposed to be like 100 people, just close friends and family there,” Greene recalled. “Turned out there were like 250 people who showed up.”
From there, it was a waiting game. Greene remembers he sat calmly through the first two picks but once he hadn’t heard as much as a phone call after pick three, he was getting anxious that his time might be soon. He was right.
“Like a minute later I got the call from my agent,” he said. “He’s like ‘hey, the Tigers are picking you’. Really cool moment for me and my family.”
Prior to this recent run of top selections − manager AJ Hinch said while it’s exciting on a night like Sunday knowing a blue-chip prospect will be added to the organization, it does mean the Tigers struggled mightily the previous season − the Tigers’ last top five pick came in 2004.
That year at No. 2 overall they took some guy you may have heard of: Justin Verlander.
Every player in the major leagues has their own story, their own journey; the path they took that makes their moment special. By the time a player reaches the big leagues, he has put in a tremendous amount of work, but Mize acknowledged there is something to be said about the rarified air the Tigers’ next top pick will experience.
“Obviously everybody in this clubhouse I have tremendous respect for, it doesn’t really matter to me where you were drafted,” Mize said. “But to have a great season before the draft is a tough thing to do, so I definitely have respect for guys who were able to harness that pressure and turn it into quality seasons to be taken that high.”
Hinch has gone through the draft process too, although he laughs at how different it is now compared to the 1990’s when he was drafted on three separate occasions.
The first time, he was in high school when there was no coverage.
“We were waiting for a landline phone to ring,” he said.
After he fell to the second round, he opted to go to Stanford instead of the draft. As a junior he was in Omaha for Baseball America, where the top prospects waited in a lobby on draft night. Again he waited for the phone.
“I was on the back end of that, got to see guys getting hugs and getting drafted,” he laughed.
He returned one more time to school and was taken in the third round by Oakland in 1996.
There’s no way to know what will come from a draft night, Greene can attest to that much. While he doesn’t have any active plans to reach out to whomever the Tigers draft Sunday night, he said his main focus is on the big league club, it wouldn’t be the first time he formed a bond with a teammate on the night they received a life changing call.
“With Tork it was a little different,” Greene said of the phone call he made in the summer of 2020. “I’m really good friends of family with the scout who drafted (him) because he lives in Oviedo, my dad does lessons for his daughters for softball. He was like ‘hey, here’s Spencer’s number, I think you’ll be good together…and then we became good buddies after that.
“I probably won’t watch tonight, might not meet him until next year … but I’m sure the Tigers will make the right decision.”
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Tigers newest top 5 draft pick about to join exclusive club