Mocking AntiBionics' Mock Draft

Raise your hand if you like Yunel Escobar. My friend, fellow blogger, and Yahoo fantasy baseball co-manager AntiBionics certainly does. He did his first mock draft of the year the other night, and while his draft was not as disasterous as mine, I do want to take a second to explore his undying affection for Yunel "I Cast A Spell" Escobar.

My sister just married into a family with the surname Escobar, so I consider any Escobar to be part of my family. Which is simply one way of saying that I like Yunel. But probably not in the 9th round. So the theme of this post is going to be, "Ha Ha You Took Yunel Way Higher Than Needed." I know, I know, it is silly to take issue with a particular pick in a mock draft in the month of February. So yes, I am aware of this fact. This post is really just an excuse to write about Yunel a little bit. And to make fun of AntiBionics in a lighthearted way.

Yunel seems to be a 16th round to 20th round type guy this year. So even if you really did love him, you probably could have waited until the 14th round or so.

Razzball puts Yunel the "Filene's Basement" tier of shortstops and projects 13 homers and three steals. Then again, Razzball took him in the 13th round of this expert mock draft. So this doesn't really help me make my point. So I found this draft, where he went in the 21st round just to even things out.

Fake Teams has Yunel ranked as the ninth-best shortstop and thinks he could jump up in the 2009 rankings. Darn, this also isn't proving my point.

But who cares where he "should" be drafted. The real questions is, will Yunel be good this year, right? According to The Prognosticators, he's going to be a 10 HR, 5 SB guy in '09.

Yunel was the second-best fielding shortstop last season, so maybe we can join a league that takes that into account.

He has seven stolen bases and eight caught stealings in his 230 career games played. I think we can officially stop calling him a stolen base threat.

Remember this game winner? "He feels really good right now, and he's just trying to help the team win," said center fielder Gregor Blanco, who was translating for Escobar. "He thought it was just a fly ball and was trying to do his job [and move the runner]." Huh. Sounds a bit like an "Oops bop" to me.

Conclusion: Maybe Yunel isn't a terrible pick like I first thought, as there still seems to be some excitement about him floating around in cyberspace, but I can't help but think he is, at best, a ten homer, handful-of-steals shortstop who can hit for a decent average. And no one is really disagreeing with this. So why, exactly, is he exciting?