SECAUCUS, New Jersey -- Farhan Zaidi doesn't seem the type to be superstitious, but if he's looking for a positive sign before his first draft as Giants president of baseball operations, he might find it with the selection the organization will make Monday night in the 2019 MLB Draft.
The Giants will pick 10th overall, and they certainly have hit home runs in that slot before. In 2006 they took Tim Lincecum with the 10th pick in the draft. A year later, Madison Bumgarner was scooped up in the same slot.
By Wins Above Replacement, those two are the best players taken 10th over the past couple of decades, but there was a strong run in the late 90s. Eric Chavez, Jon Garland, Carlos Pena and Ben Sheets went 10th in four consecutive seasons and all had good big league careers.
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The best player to get drafted 10th overall is Mark McGwire in 1984, and while the Giants can't expect 583 career homers from this selection, they certainly need to make a splash. The farm system is starving for impact talent and this draft is considered heavy on college bats, a direction the Giants have been leaning in recent weeks.
You generally take the best player available, but if the Giants do indeed take a college hitter, and take a good one, they could start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, with the 2019 selection joining Joey Bart and Heliot Ramos as a future core.
Eight of the last nine players taken 10th overall have been position players, and Michael Conforto looks like a nice model for what the Giants might be looking for. Taken out of Oregon State in 2014, he made the big leagues a year later and has already been worth 11 WAR to the Mets.
The four players taken 10th since Conforto haven't reached the big leagues yet. The Phillies took prep shortstop Cornelius Randolph in 2015, but he has stalled in Double-A. The White Sox took Miami catcher Zack Collins the next year; he was a top 100 prospect before his first full season and currently is putting up good numbers in Triple-A.
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Prep outfielder Jo Adell, taken by the Angels in 2017, is another model for success. The 20-year-old is in High-A ball and is the No. 6 prospect in the minors, according to Baseball America.
Last year, the Pirates took South Alabama outfielder Travis Swaggerty 10th overall. Like Bart, he is in High-A ball a year after the draft, with a .717 OPS and five homers in 48 games.