As the baseball season draws nearer, the Florida Gators again have one of the nation’s premier squads. They dominated the field of competition before the coronavirus forced college sports to shut down last spring. Most of the key pieces on their roster stayed intact, despite several of their cornerstones being draft-eligible last July, largely due to the shortened five-round format of the 2020 MLB draft.
Understandably, the most highly-rated Gator is Jud Fabian, who is widely anticipated to be drafted within the first ten picks of the 2021 MLB draft. However, that’s not where it ends for Florida, who has a loaded roster of players with a chance to turn professional.
One player to keep an eye on in the upcoming draft cycle is righty starter Jack Leftwich.
Selected by Detroit in the latest rounds of the 2017 draft, he wisely opted to attend school instead. Florida has been a pipeline for talented pitchers in recent years and Leftwich may just be the next player in line to grab headlines. At least, that’s the opinion of Aaron Fitt, who wrote this for D1 Baseball after seeing him pitch in November.
Leftwich worked fast and stayed in attack mode, flashed three good very good pitches at times, and showed the ability to pitch out of trouble. I’m betting on Leftwich to finally put it all together in 2021.
Of course, there’s still work to be done in refining his game. Neither MLB Pipeline nor FanGraphs rank him within their top 100 prospects for the 2021 draft. Prospects Live is more bullish, but still ranks him well outside the first round. However, if he’s able to put together a more consistent string of performances and get swings and misses off his powerful pitching, Leftwich could rise up draft boards quickly this spring.
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