Tampa Bay Rays news and links: Draft day

It's draft day in baseball, so now's the time to spend a moment thinking about Tim Beckham and Buster Posey.

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Okay, moment over. We can be done with that now, right?

Nope. Shucks.

In the Tampa Bay Times, Marc Topkin went down the list of all of the Rays' recent first round picks, and who they could have picked in a perfect world. That's not a fair way to judge teams' drafting ability--everybody misses much of the time--but no, the recent run of first round picks hasn't been great.

As Topkin also noted in the Times a few days ago that this will be the first draft under Rob Metzler, their new director of amateur scouting.

Bill Chastain on the Rays beat for MLB.com gave a good little preview of the Rays in the upcoming draft.

Non-draft links:

- Narrative narrative narrative. But you can attribute cause where you want, if you want.

- In Topkin's notes, Drew Smyly will be skipped to work on the finish of his offspeed pitches--"but don't worry, his shoulder's not hurt"--and Logan Forsythe could return this morning.

- Also, still likely a long ways away, but one of the Rays' DL projects is back.

- It's possible Venters could be useful later on this season if the Rays' starters aren't able to up their innings.

Non-Draft, Non-Rays Links:

- So, this one is legitimately exciting. Tom Tango is arguable the best baseball researcher hanging out in the (partly) public domain. He's an insightful guy who works systematically and honestly, and who also cares about building foundations to allow others to do good work. And now he's going to be put in charge of the Statcast Data for MLB. Dave Cameron interviewed him.

- This sort of seems like a Rays link, actually: First basemen can no longer hit.

- CC Sabathia: not done yet.