Pretty sure they'll take who they think is the best player, even if it is a pitcher that will break your heart with injuries.
This is semantics. BVA, best value, perhaps more accurate than BPA. I think they'll pick the guy they project as the best value, and obviously risk factors in. If they take a pitcher, I assume that will require that his projected value is superior enough to justify the heightened risks.
But, picking at #9 is a very different risk analysis from picking 2 and 4 the last two years. With Bryant and Schwarber, I think they had scouted those guys well enough to be very confident that they'd hit. The risk that they wouldn't hit was low.
But at #9, there will perhaps be significant risk that hitters won't hit. Kyle Tucker, Nick Plummer, Daz Cameron, Trenton Clark, Garrett Whitley, these are some nice prospects and perhaps will hit very well. But the risk differential between the hitters who'll be there at #9 versus the pitchers may not be that substantial. The injury-to-pitcher risk may really not be that much more problematic than the risk that the hitters won't hit.
That's partly where Ian Happ, Swanson, and Bregman fit. Presumably Swanson and Bregman will be gone, but who knows? But Happ seems like he might profile as a pretty low-risk guy. And, he's young for his class, he won't turn 21 till the end of the minor league season. Cubs will scout, obviously. But from the scouting reports, he seems like the kind of guy the Cubs might like: a good hitter who may not have any signature tools, but perhaps is pretty good at everything.
Who knows, I don't think at this point last year there were a lot of us seriously thinking Schwarber, and none of the draft guru's were including him in discussion for top-5. But, the sub-slot signing really combined a guy they wanted with discretionary dollars. Maybe the Cubs really like Kevin Newman, for example, and think he'll be a good though not great major leaguer; but can sign him for #25-slot money instead of #9 cash. Maybe they'd then be able to sign a couple of million-dollar pitchers in rounds 2-4, like last year? Get a safe low-risk pure hitter, and then spread the risk over three talented-but-risky HS pitchers instead of focusing all the risk on a single HS pitcher at #9?
Who knows. Should be fun.
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