The Rays Tank: Draft Day is here

Happy Draft Day, y'all.

If you're like me, this is a day where you get arbitrarily excited or disappointed by the names of a bunch of kids about which you have almost no knowledge. You then proceed to forget most of those names for a year or two before they start creeping up the minor league depth charts, and then you begin to form unwarrantedly strong opinions when Michael asks you to rank them in the offseason community prospect list. I think that makes me a "silly person," so I took special enjoyment from The Silly Person's Guide to Top MLB Draft Prospects by Michael Baumann over on Grantland.

Luckily for you, though, not everyone is like me. Scott and Michael have been doing a bang-up job with pre-draft coverage, and you can catch up on all of their prep-work here. If you really want to be prepped, sift through everything written about the draft by an SB Nation site. And over at The Process Report, RJ gave a brief roundup of every player linked to the Rays in a mock draft so far.

When the draft starts, we'll have a separate GDT to comment on it, full of our most knowledgeable people, and also maybe me, plus writeups of each Rays pick as they are made.

Non-Draft

Jeff Sullivan is pessimistic about Matt Moore's control (I am not).

There's a great new piece up at The Hardball Times by Greg Rybarczyk about properly assigning run values to catchers, pitchers, and runners for stolen bases based on each other's running and throwing times. The data isn't there to easily put it into use in the public domain, but it's extremely cool.