For clarity, while I like Bazzana and Condon better, I really, really like Montgomery and would be okay if we took him.
Nolan Jones arm, his power didn't carry over to his 2023 Cape Cod #s but he hit the shit out of the ball:
53 AB: .340 BA /.429 OBP /.472 SLG /.900 OPS
I like Bazzana the most because he's an absolute psychopath about baseball - Bauer-like minus the asshole/weirdo vibes – and his stats back it up. Few blurbs
from this article I know was posted a while ago:
1. When agent Chase Brewer approached Bazzana his freshman season to see if he was interested in future representation, Bazzana didn’t ask about draft projections or future big league earnings.
He wanted to know if Brewer had an analytics expert and, if so, whether he had information about All-Star Juan Soto’s contact rate and exit velocity. Bazzana would text Brewer at 6 a.m. on Saturdays with next-level data questions about batted-ball metrics and swing-and-miss rates.
And then there's this:
2. Earlier this season (2023), when the Beavers were in an extended slump, Canham challenged his team to be more aggressive on the basepaths to light a spark. So Bazzana decided he would master the art of stealing bases.
He pulled up YouTube clips of Anthony Volpe to study how the Yankees’ leadoff hitter used a walking lead. Then he reached out to Cal Bears center fielder Rodney Green through Instagram to pick his brain about stealing bases. At the time, Green, after recording just one steal last season, led the Pac-12 with 24 — 12 more than Bazzana.
“How do you have 24 stolen bases?” Bazzana wrote Green. “What do you do? What changed?”
After watching video of Volpe and chatting with Green, Bazzana came up with a fool-proof formula.
If he effectively used a walking lead, he could steal a base so long as a pitcher’s delivery to the plate stretched 1.3 seconds or longer. He didn’t even need a good jump. It was simple math. He just needed to trust the data.....
....He swiped a school-record five steals in a win over Seattle. It was part of a run in which he stole at least one base in 12 of 13 games a
nd he went on to steal 27 bases over the final 24 games of the season. Bazzana enters the regionals with a school-record 36 — seven more than Green.