Carlos Gomez has another article up analyzing some of this years draft picks. Carlos wasn’t too impressed with the Schmidt pick, but he liked these two picks a lot more! Here he is:

“Kulbacki’s approach and hand/bat position at footplant remind me of Rafael Palmeiro. Kulbacki has very good swing mechanics. He does a nice job of loading his hands and hips and then exploding through the ball. His swing has very little noise and it looks like he’ll be able to consistently make good contact. He’s another hitter who stays behind the ball very well. I like this pick here at 40. Good power potential.”

Yea, sounds pretty good. And on Cumberland:

“Simple swing, very little noise, good swing plane, a slight load of his hands, carries his hips forward well into footplant. In short, I like it quite a bit. Where Cumberland gets into trouble (and you see it in his game swings) is when he gets “pushy” with the hands instead of rotating his hips and his hands around a fixed axis of rotation. Because Cumberland’s main asset is his speed, my guess is that Cumberland has been taught to hit the ball on the ground and use his speed. “

I’ve thought about this with someone like Ichiro. People always talk about how he can hit home runs if he wants to or whatever. And I always wonder why he doesn’t try to do it. He always seems to be running out of the box, certainly in an even more exaggerated fashion than Cumberland. Ichiro is pretty successful doing his thing, but he’s a special guy. I wouldn’t think you would want to teach many players that type of approach (or even the approach that Gomez is describing), especially if they have some power potential (which it appears Cumberland does). I guess it depends on what the Padres developmental guys (and organization as a whole) want to do with Cumberland.

When the Padres initially made this selection, I didn’t really like it. But that was mostly based upon the fact that Schmidt’s numbers, for a so called polished college hurler, weren’t overly impressive. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that unadjusted college numbers (although I did try to compare them to the rest of the Arkansas staff) are not the end-all-be-all when evaluating draft picks. Not even close.

But now Carlos Gomez – stathead, former pitcher, mechanics guru – comes by and criticizes Schmidt as well. And this is more from a scouting perspective. Here’s Gomez:

Schmidt has a painfully slow tempo, an abrupt finish and just takes forever to go through his delivery. In short, he’s a “tall and fall” guy all the way.

Did you catch how quickly Schmidt stops his arm after release? He slams on the brakes pretty quick… Schmidt? No thanks

Check out the link for video and more analysis. I also posted the link on the espn board where Gomez himself was nice enough to stop by and answer some questions. In short, I didn’t like the Schmidt pick yesterday and I like it even less today.