2024 Draft Q&A: MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis

Few have the expertise and longevity of Jim Callis, who has covered the major league draft for over 20 years. Callis began at Baseball America, where he ultimately served as executive editor, and now works as a senior writer for MLB Pipeline. You can now catch him all over Twitter on MLB.com and the MLB Network.

As the deadline for signing draft picks arrives Thursday, we talked with Jim as part of our post-draft series.

MadFriars: The 2023 draft was billed as one of the best recent drafts. How did the 2024 draft compare to it in terms of top-end and overall talent?

Jim Callis: There are good players in every draft. This probably would be considered a slightly below-average draft. The college-hitting crop was the strength of the draft and would be comparable to most years. I am not sure how college pitchers and high school hitters and pitchers would hold up compared to a typical year. It was a below-average draft with some good college hitters that went at the top, but it wasn’t a solid draft overall.

With signing bonuses and draft manipulation, it is tough to be accurate in your mock draft, yet you’ve had the Padres linked to Kash Mayfield almost the entire time. Does A.J. Preller have that big a tell? 

Jim Callis: Well, you knew he would take a prep player. It has been eight short years since he selected a high schooler in the first round. Even the last time they selected a college player first, they had multiple first-round picks and selected a high schooler in the first round. (In 2016, the Padres took Cal Quantrill from Stanford, then high schooler Hudson Potts.)

Besides being a prep player, what about Kash Mayfield made you mock him to the Padres so often?

Jim Callis: The Padres don’t make it any secret that they like prep players and players with high upsides. Based on where they were picking, that was Kash Mayfield. As a junior, he was the Oklahoma Player of the Year and had a heavy workload pitching in the state playoffs, so he did not do much in the summer showcase circuit. So, a lot of scouts didn’t have much of a chance to see him.

He did pop up at a showcase earlier this year and looked good. His fastball was up to 96 mph, and he won the Gatorade Player of the Year again as a senior. Last year, when we saw him, he was mainly in his upper 80s. This year, we see 92-95 and touching 97, with more room to grow. He has a good feel for a curveball, good delivery, and good extension on his pitches. He has a lot of projectability, which is something the Padres love. He is a bit older, already 19. I am not sure age matters as much for pitchers as it does for hitters. But even at 19, he still has some projection remaining.

There were a lot of comps this spring for Jordan Wicks, but Mayfield is a much better prospect than Wicks, who was at the same stage. MaMayfield’s stuff is on a different level from Wicks’ stuff at the same age. People liked Wicks, but he would not go in the first round then. Wicks is a good starting spot, but you can look at Mayfield and see someone who can pitch in the upper part of a rotation someday.

The biggest negative I heard on Mayfield was about being a 19-year-old high schooler. I see the difference between a college senior and a 17-year-old, but is that big a difference between high school students?

Jim Callis: Every team is different. It is more of a tiebreaker. If you think tools are equal, you might lean toward the 17-year-old instead of 19. But again, especially with pitchers, how many of them stay healthy the entire way through the minors? Most of them are on nonlinear paths to the majors, so age shouldn’t be much of a factor. It is way more of a factor for a hitter.

Keeping with high schoolers, I was surprised that Kale Fountain dropped to the fifth round. MLB.com had a fairly glowing write-up on him. Did he only fall due to his commitment to LSU? What were your overall thoughts on Fountain?

Jim Callis: He will sign if he’s taken in the top 10 rounds. I believe one player in the top 10 rounds last year didn’t. With Fountain, there are a bit of mixed reviews of him. Some scouts like him. He has big-time power and is NeNebraska’sll-time home run leader. He’s 6-foot-5, 225 lbs. He has a lot of loft in his swing, and the ball explodes off his bat. His biggest knocks were that he has an uphill swing that could be exploited, and he needs to tighten his strike zone discipline a little.

I think everyone agrees he has immense power and arm strength. There are mixed reviews about his hitting ability and whether he can stay at third. Some believe he has an underrated athleticism, while others think he is not particularly agile and will eventually move to first. But you are drafting him for his power bat and projecting on that. I would venture to guess he gets well over slot. [He received second-round money at $1.7 million]. The Padres [were] able to afford it based on the number of senior signs they took later in the draft.

The pick right before Fountain was another big-time power hitter, Kavares Tears. MLBMLB’s site-up on him made him sound almost like Pedro Serrano. He has tremendous power on the fastball but struggles to hit the offspeed pitch. What are the chances that he can hit offspeed pitches at higher levels?

Jim Callis: I don’t have the data in front of me, but after watching the College World Series, I believe the trouble with the offspeed pitches was more from last year, and he has already made huge improvements on that front. Tears didn’t play much in his first two years, and Tennessee has a track record of not playing younger players. Trey Lipscomb is another. He didn’t do much for three years for Tennessee, but he became a fourth-round pick as a senior and is now in the big leagues.

I thought Tears was a great pick in the fourth. You have a player with plus raw power, well above average speed, and an experienced college bat. I have reports that he has above-average speed and others with above-average arm strength. Some scouts say he is quicker out of the box as a batter than defensively in the field.

He played center field during the College World Series. Do you see him with more of a right-field profile?

Jim Callis: I think he has the speed to play center. Tennessee had a better defensive center fielder, so Tears played right. When he got hurt in Omaha, Tears moved over to center, and Tennessee was fine, and he made some nice plays. Based on his speed, the Padres will try him in center. Usually, when a fairly quick player in college plays right, it is because they have someone quicker in center and not because that player can’t do it. He has experience there, and I would run him out in the center until you have someone better or he shows you he can’t.

Another fourth-round selection the Padres took, Tyson Neighbors, was viewed as a player who could move through the minors the quickest. Is it just because he is a reliever? What about his repertoire gives him that ability?

Jim Callis: Pretty simple; he can miss bats with three different pitches. He was a little sharper last year than he was this spring. He had a bit of a leg strain that hampered him this year. But he has a two-plane 81-84 mph slider with a high spin rate. He has an upper-80s cutter that’s harder, and he misses a ton of bats. Then his fastball is 93-95 but can be up to 99 with an induced vertical break. All three of those pitches are viewed as being plus or better. I don’t think he has much projection other than a reliever, but I can see him moving up quickly as a reliever.

The Padres were the first team to select a player not in MLB’s top 250 when they selected Cobb Hightower in the third round. Information is pretty scarce on him. Other than that, he is a shortstop from a small town in North Carolina who hit over .500. Do you have any information you can give us about him?

Jim Callis: I wouldn’t think your list is the be-all-end-all list—many guys who don’t make the list end up in the majors. For Hightower, he was on our radar. He is 6-foot 180 pounds; he has pretty good bat speed. But the scouts that saw him gave him a lot of question marks on his tools. Word was that he was signable. With good bat speed, there is a base to work off of, but his power and ability to stay short are questions. But we will see.

The Padres—and I mean this in a good way—do not care where national guys rank people. They like who they like. Their track record of uncovering prospects over the years has been some of the best in baseball. They seem high on Hightower, so I wonder how it plays out.

On day three, the Padres selected two-way player Sean Barnett. I know everyone dreams of having an Ohtani in their organization, but how likely is it that when any player is signed as a two-way player, they continue doing both for more than a year or so?

Jim Callis: Many people get announced as two-way players, but few stick. Part of the issue is that Ohtani makes it look like doing both is easy.

One, it’s tough to do because Ohtani may be the best baseball player of all time; just look at what he has to do, not just the raw ability to do both but also the off-field studying that goes into being a hitter or a pitcher at the next level. You now have to spend the time you would use to prepare for one role on the other. It is just brutal. The Padres see him as a two-way player for 2025, but I would be shocked if he continued for more than a year or so at both.

Final question: is there any pick, whether we have talked about them already or not, that stood out as an excellent value for where they were drafted? 

Jim Callis: We’ve discussed them, but I liked the value they got by getting Tears and Neighbors in the fourth round. If you told me Tears had gone in the second round and Neighbors in the third, I would have believed it. I think both of those guys are going to be pretty good contributors. I’m not. I’m not sure why they fell so much. But you are talking about an outfielder with big power who played in the SEC for a national championship team and a closer with three-plus pitches with excellent swing-and-miss stuff. Both of those guys are super intriguing picks.