Texas Rangers show heart with this draft pick

Warmed by a draft

Years from now — heck, months from now — few people may remember who the Texas Rangers took with their first pick in last week’s Major League Baseball draft. (It was Georgia high school left-hander Kevin Matthews.)

But let’s hope it’s a while before people forget who the Rangers took in the 33rd round. That’s when Texas selected University of Georgia outfielder Johnathan Taylor, who has been partially paralyzed since his neck was broken during a collision in the outfield three months ago.

“This was truly a classy move and a great gesture on the part of the Texas Rangers organization,” Georgia Coach David Perno said.

Earlier in the draft, the Rangers took Taylor’s Georgia teammate, Zach Cone, with the 37th overall pick. Cone is one of Taylor’s closest friends and was the player with whom Taylor collided when he suffered his injury.

“We talk about being a franchise about family,” Kip Fagg, the Rangers’ director of amateur scouting, told ESPN.com. “Johnathan was a good person and someone we wanted to help.”

Taylor, a 5-foot-8, 181-pound junior with a .312 career average at Georgia, is completing his rehabilitation at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, where he is said to be making improvements.

Rays of hope

It was a historic draft for the Tampa Bay Rays, whose free-agent losses last winter earned them 10 additional selections before the end of the second round. That made the Rays the first team in history with 12 of the first 100 picks — a necessary bounty for a small-market team in baseball’s most expensive and competitive division.

Scouting director R.J. Harrison made sure he didn’t blow the opportunity, running his staff through a couple of mock drafts “just to kind of prepare ourselves.”

Tampa’s first-day haul included four pitchers, three infielders and three outfielders. The biggest prize came with the 24th pick of the first round — compensation from Boston for the Red Sox’s signing of free agent Carl Crawford — which the Rays used on Taylor Guerrieri, a South Carolina high school pitcher.

History, however, may not be on the Rays’ side. In 1990, the Montreal Expos had 11 of the first 84 picks. Seven of them made the major leagues but none made much of an impact.

Seven years later, the Expos had nine picks in the first 100, the same as Oakland in 2002. Outfielder Nick Swisher, now with the New York Yankees, and right-hander Joe Blanton, now with Philadelphia, were probably the best of those 18.

Consider Harrison’s recent track record though: Two of his last four top picks — David Price and Evan Longoria — are already All-Stars.

Statwatch(Draft edition)

• 1,530 players were chosen in the 50 rounds and two compensation rounds of this year’s draft. Pitchers accounted for more than half the selections — 793, including 218 left-handers.

• Vanderbilt led all colleges with 12 selections. Fresno State topped California schools with 11 picks. Maine was the only state that did not have a player drafted. There were 284 Californians taken, nearly twice as many as any other state.

— Kevin Baxter