Mariners pick third in today’s draft

SEATTLE — Tom McNamara, the Mariners’ perpetually sweater vest-clad scouting director, is about as likely to tell you who Seattle is targeting with the third pick of this year’s draft as he is to wear a sweater with sleeves, but he will offer this much.

“You’ve got to get the first guy right,” he said.

And that’s particularly true when a team is, for the third time in four years, picking near the top of the draft. The Major League Baseball draft, which begins with the first round today and runs through Wednesday, may not come with the fanfare that surrounds the NFL or NBA drafts, but it isn’t any less important, especially for teams such as the Mariners who are hoping to land franchise building blocks with their top picks.

This will be Seattle’s fourth draft since Jack Zduriencik took over as general manger following the 2008 season, and in that time the Mariners have twice picked No. 2 overall, and have added several players who they hope will be big parts of the team’s future. Dustin Ackley, the No. 2 pick in 2009, and Kyle Seager, a third-round pick that year, are already contributing at the big-league level. The Mariners’ top pick in 2010, Taijuan Walker (43rd overall) has been dominating minor-league hitters in Class AA Jackson, as have fellow 2010 pick James Paxton (fourth round) and last year’s No. 2 overall pick, Danny Hultzen.

Of course it is far too early to determine just how well the Mariners drafted in any of those years, but what recent history has shown is how much it can set a franchise back when it misses with picks near the top of the draft.

Prior to the Mariners’ most recent front-office shakeup, the team’s recent draft history is full of moves that came back to haunt the franchise. The most obvious example was the Mariners’ decision to take Brandon Morrow ahead of local product Tim Lincecum in 2006. Lincecum went on to win two Cy Young awards for the San Francisco Giants, and while Morrow is now enjoying a good season, he is doing it with another team having been traded to Toronto prior to the 2010 season. A year earlier, the Mariners used the No. 3 pick on Jeff Clement, choosing the USC catcher over the likes of reigning NL MVP Ryan Braun and All-Stars Troy Tulowitzki and Ryan Zimmerman.

And on the rare occasion in the past decade when the Mariners did select a future All-Star with their first pick, they traded Adam Jones to Baltimore before he emerged as one of the American League’s top players.

All of this is a long way of saying, as McNamara pointed out, teams can’t afford to mess up a pick at the top of the draft. Seattle has spent months scouting the top high school and college prospects to minimize the chances of getting it wrong today, but which way the Mariners are leaning with that pick remains a mystery.

Last season, nearly everyone assumed Seattle would use the No. 2 pick to help an anemic offense, but the Mariners viewed Hultzen, a left-handed pitcher, as the best player available, so they picked him. That strategy won’t change this year, or any time in the future.

“I still believe in taking the best guy, whether it’s a hitter or a pitcher,” McNamara said. “Because the day you draft for need and you pass on that guy you really think should be the guy you should take, it’ll come back and haunt you. That guy will go out and be a Cy Young winner and you might have a part-time player in the big leagues, and everyone is going to ask you, ‘How come you didn’t take the other guy?’ So you take the best player.”

Just who will be the best player available when Seattle drafts remains to be seen. The general consensus among draft experts is that Stanford pitcher Mark Appel and Byron Buxton, a high school outfielder from Georgia, will be the top two picks, though not necessarily in that order. If either fell to Seattle, they would be hard to pass up, but assuming they are both gone, who would that leave for the Mariners? University of Florida catcher Mike Zunino is the player many think will end up in Seattle, but the Mariners also could opt for Carlos Correa, a high school shortstop from Puerto Rico, or any number of top college pitchers.

McNamara said the Mariners spent plenty of time identifying their top five prospects — a couple extra in case last-minute injury or signability issues arise — and while no one is saying who they like best, the Mariners know they need to find an impact player with that pick.

“If we think the best player at No. 3 is a high school player, we’ll take the high school player,” McNamara said. “If we think it’s a college position player, we’ll take the college position player. If we think it’s a high pitcher, college pitcher, we’ll just take the best guy.”

Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com.