2024 MLB Draft's biggest surprises: Guardians stay committed at No. 1, SEC bat slips out of first round

Major League Baseball's amateur draft kicked off on Sunday night, with the Cleveland Guardians using the first No. 1 pick in franchise history on Oregon State second baseman Travis Bazzana. Teams then made 73 additional picks on the night, with many of the earliest ones being used on collegiate hitters, before hitting the pause button.

The MLB draft will resume at 2 p.m. ET on Monday afternoon. (It will then reach its culmination on Tuesday, with the 20th round.) Before teams started picking again, I wanted to tackle one more angle from the first day: the biggest surprises. Bear in mind, what surprises me might be different than what surprises you, and that a "surprise" is not necessarily a bad thing; it's simply something that made me think, "huh."

With that explanation out of the way, let's touch on four things -- picks, trends, what have you -- that caught me off guard over the first 74 picks.

1. Bazzana goes No. 1

Bazzana's selection was Schrodinger's draft pick: it was and was not a surprise. Loyal readers will recall that I reported in January that other front offices believed the Guardians and first-year scouting director Ethan Purser were enamored with Bazzana's game . This is my fifth year wearing the Draft Expert hat (among others) around here -- not once before had I encountered such conviction about who a team liked so early in the draft process. You would've thought that Bazzana was a Harper-level generational prospect or something.

To be clear: I believed those scouts, analysts, and directors when they told me about Cleveland's fascination with Bazzana. But I also knew that there was a long way to go before draft night. Talk to anyone within a scouting department and they'll tell you these decisions are made later than you'd expect. A lot can happen over six months. The Guardians could have been swept up by Charlie Condon's ascent, or they could have identified JJ Wetherholt's injury as an opportunity to get a Bazzana proxy for less coin.

That none of that happened, and that the Guardians actually took Bazzana, the way the industry predicted they would six months ago, is remarkable in a sense -- even if picking him represented the boring, "predictable" choice.

2. Brewers go off the board

As noted above, this was my fifth draft guiding our coverage here at CBS Sports. It may have been my best first round. Of the top 30 picks, all but four were in my top 30 and all but two were included in my top 50. Not bad for a class that, leading up to the night, had evaluators struggling to form a consensus beyond the head end of the first round. It's fair to write, then, that teams mostly colored between the lines on Sunday. The biggest exception was the Milwaukee Brewers, who made four selections (including two in the top 50) and didn't choose a single player that I ranked in the top 50. To recap their night:

• No. 17: OF Braylon Payne
• No. 34: 1B Blake Burke
• No. 57: RHP Bryce Meccage
• No. 67: RHP Chris Levonas

Payne has an angular frame and some real power-speed upside, but he'll require a fair amount of baking time to get there. Burke is an SEC-vetted thumper, albeit one with swing-and-miss and a sub-7% walk rate in conference play. Meccage and Levonas are both promising righty prep arms who, again, will need some guidance to max out.

One of the eternal struggles of transaction analysis is figuring out how much benefit of a doubt to give a team when their moves 1) stray from convention but 2) play to their strengths. You have to simultaneously trust your reads of the players -- and their standing in the eyes of other front offices/the league as a whole -- while allowing room for self-doubt and the definite possibility that a standout front office knows better.

The above is certainly relevant here. The Brewers have a very good front office. Look at their roster, look at some of the names, and then look at some of the production from those names. Cameron Castro, Milwaukee's vice president of player development, is someone who has been identified to me as a rising star in the industry. It's hard to deny any of that.

So, what is there to make of Milwaukee's night? Clearly the Brewers have some profiles they like, and that they think they can get the most from. Will the Brewers be proven right? Stay tuned. That's the fun part.

3. Kentucky's Waldschmidt slips out of first round

Ryan Waldschmidt was one of my favorite mid-first-round prospects coming into Sunday. He had a big season at Kentucky and within the SEC, posting impressive analytics (particularly his exit velocity and chase rates) and even winning over old-school scouts with his above-average athleticism and strong play into the postseason. Everything I heard  suggested that he was rising up boards, and that he was a real candidate to go in the top 20. That's why I ranked him 16th, noting that he was " a bat on the rise ."

Waldschmidt, it turned out, did not go that early. Instead, he slipped just outside of the first round, to the Arizona Diamondbacks at No. 31. (Remember, the first round concluded with the Texas Rangers ' selection at No. 30.) What happened here?

I haven't asked around yet; I generally wait until after the draft concludes and people have had a chance to catch their breath and recover from the three-day stretch before I start pestering them with questions. My guess, though, is that teams continued to harbor concerns about some combination of his swing, his defensive value, or his old ACL injury. Fair enough. It's not like going No. 31 is some big insult anyway, and he could prove to be a nice value pick-up for the Diamondbacks. This piece is about surprises, however, and his slip qualified as one in a draft that mostly went according to plan in the early going.

4. Angels go reliever heavy

Let's wrap this up by quickly touching on the Los Angeles Angels, who used two of their three top-75 picks on pitchers who profile as relievers at the big-league level.

To recap: the Angels chose Tennessee second baseman Christian Moore at No. 8. That was a little higher than I expected him to go, but it's a justifiable selection if you believe in the bat. (I suspect that the Angels also saved some money on that selection that they can use later on, but that's to be seen.) The Angels then picked the pitchers du jour , in collegiate righties Chris Cortez (Texas A&M, No. 45) and Ryan Johnson (Dallas Baptist, No. 74).

Both Cortez and Johnson have big-time arms. They also have big-time questions about their future roles. Part of the uncertainty stems from unusual deliveries, but it's not just that. Cortez, for his part, started only 10 of his 69 collegiate appearances; that didn't prevent him from averaging more than five walks per nine innings throughout his Aggies tenure. Johnson was better at throwing strikes, yet he used his slider so frequently that it would stand out among starters, even in this modern era of "spam your best pitch."

Cortez and Johnson (and Moore, for that matter) do fit with the Angels' recent strategy of taking players they can hasten to the majors. It seems wholly possible -- based on how Perry Minasian handled Chase Silseth , Zach Neto, Ben Joyce , and Nolan Schanuel -- that two or even all three of them make their debuts before next summer's draft. Who knows, Cortez and Johnson could become impact-caliber relievers in that span.

As I noted in the Brewers section, teams have every right to love their own sauce. Nevertheless, in this case I do have to question the wisdom of a noncompetitive team -- complete with a bad farm system -- taking two pitchers that even they may view as relievers (on draft night, mind you) with top-75 picks. There's leaning into your strengths, and then there's preventing yourself from developing any in the first place.