Twins draft 2 powerful backstops on Day 3
Do-Hyoung Park
@dohyoungparkMINNEAPOLIS -- It's not often that you see catchers setting program home run records -- but Andrew Cossetti was that guy at Saint Joseph's University, crushing 43 round-trippers in four seasons to blow through the program's offensive record books.
And considering the Twins felt that the 2022 MLB Draft class was thin on catchers, as usual, they were pleased to add Cossetti's power and defensive potential in the 11th round to begin their third and final day of selections on Tuesday.
"Taking a guy like Cossetti, who has offensively put up some numbers, and the defense, there's certainly a lot of traits in there that our player development can work with," Twins scouting director Sean Johnson said. "We're really excited about adding him on day three."
The Twins added four more pitchers, a pair of outfielders, a pair of infielders and two catchers in Rounds 11-20 to complete a Draft class that was anchored in the first two rounds by Brooks Lee and Connor Prielipp, who both unexpectedly dropped to the Twins to give them strong value with their first two selections.
The pair of backstops came first on Tuesday, with the Twins snagging Cossetti in Round 11 and Arizona State backstop Nate Baez in Round 12 to address one of their organizational needs at the lower levels.
Baez also has plenty of pop, with 18 homers across his two seasons at ASU, but Cossetti almost bested that mark in each of his last two campaigns, with 16 as a junior in '21 and 19 as a senior this season. The competition in the Atlantic 10 isn't as high as that in the Pac-12, but he did all he could to make an impact on the stat sheet, with OPS marks of 1.170 and 1.168 in those seasons.
"It is an honor and a blessing to be drafted by the Minnesota Twins," Cossetti said in a statement. "It is the opportunity of a lifetime that I have dreamed about since I was a kid. I wouldn't have been able to do it without the help of Skip and the rest of the coaching staff at St. Joe's. They believed in me since day one and gave me the chance to prove the player I can be."
The Twins have a strong recent track record of drafting and developing defense within their organization's catchers. When they selected Ryan Jeffers from the University of North Carolina Wilmington in the second round of the 2018 Draft, some evaluators saw Jeffers as a bat-first prospect who would never do much on defense. But now, Jeffers is their catcher of the future after developing into a very strong receiver.
And even before that, the Twins had drafted Ben Rortvedt in the second round of the '16 Draft, with Rortvedt also working his way up the system with strong defense, to the point that the Yankees acquired him in the Josh Donaldson trade last offseason to bolster their receiving corps.
"As always, we start with what our scouts think about the defense, and we also have models that will capture receiving and blocking metrics," Johnson said. "We're trying to look for those two observations and evaluations to line up with each other. If our scouts think a pitcher's a really good receiver and the metrics say he's not, we don't just go with one or the other."
Saint Joseph's hasn't traditionally been a baseball pipeline, having only produced two big leaguers in recent years: Jamie Moyer and Jimmy Yacabonis. The Twins will hope to build on Cossetti's bat to add him to that group.