The Yankees have a long history of drafting high-school shortstops in the first round.
From Derek Jeter to Anthony Volpe to current top prospect George Lombard Jr., the Yankees boast their share of success selecting players in that profile.
They hope Dax Kilby is the next in line.
The Yankees drafted Kilby, 18, with the No. 39 overall pick in this week’s draft, headlining a class of 19 players.
Kilby is a 6-2, 190-pound infielder from Newnan High School near Atlanta, whom he just led to a Georgia state 5-A championship. The lefty-swinging Kilby batted .495 with five home runs, 42 RBI and 15 stolen bases as a senior.
“He was athletic. He has a major-league body. His swing works real well,” Damon Oppenheimer, the Yankees’ vice president of domestic amateur scouting, said Tuesday on a post-draft Zoom call.
“He’s got a contact-oriented swing that also has power and adapts to being able to hit balls in different quadrants. On top of that, he can run. He’s got good instincts, and what we saw of him at shortstop this year gave us a lot of hope that, with our [player-development] people, … he’s going to be able to play shortstop.”
This is the fourth time in seven years that the Yankees drafted a shortstop in the first round, having selected Volpe in 2019, Trey Sweeney in 2021 and Lombard in 2023.
Shortstops are often a draft’s most athletic position players and thus among the top commodities.
MLB Pipeline ranked Kilby as this draft’s No. 62 prospect, while Baseball American ranked him No. 75, but the Yankees were higher on the infielder, a Clemson commit. Oppenheimer said a team that picked in the 20s told him they had eyed Kilby, too.
“We’ve scouted him intently. Eight different scouts see him at different times,” Oppenheimer said.
“We’ve had him tested by our performance-science people. We’ve had him meet with our mental-conditioning department. He’s been down here to Tampa to visit to see what he would be getting himself into. We’ve met with the family. The deep dive is so much further than what the publications [are] going to have done.”
Kilby was the Yankees’ only pick within the top 100, as they forfeited their second-rounder to sign Max Fried in free agency.
Their next pick came in the third round at No. 103, where they selected shortstop Kaeden Kent — the son of 2000 National League MVP Jeff Kent — out of Texas A&M University.
Kent, 21, batted .279 with 13 home runs, 49 RBI and a .942 OPS in 56 games as a junior last season.
Oppenheimer said Kent is different from his father in that he bats left-handed and plays shortstop, rather than second base, but he believes they possess a similar level of intensity.
“The only dialogue, personally, I ever had with Jeff Kent was watching Kaeden play in a Cape Cod League game, and it just happened to be by accident. … He let his kid do the talking on the field,” Oppenheimer said.
“Being raised in a major-league house, we do know that’s an advantage. They have some knowledge of what’s getting ready to happen and what they need to do.”
The Yankees selected left-hander Pico Kohn out of Mississippi State at No. 134; infielder Core Jackson out of Utah at No. 164; and right-hander Rory Fox out of Notre Dame at No. 194.
Their seventh-round pick, outfielder Richie Bonomolo Jr. from Alabama, hails from the Bronx and played high-school baseball at Cardinal Hayes. The Yankees’ final pick was infielder Bryce Martin-Grudzielanek — the son of former All-Star infielder Mark Grudzielanek — out of USC at No. 614.
Kilby was the only high schooler taken by the Yankees, whose draft included 10 pitchers, seven infielders and two outfielders.
Oppenheimer said the Yankees were “fired up” with their draft haul, despite having the smallest bonus pool ($5,383,600) to sign players of the 30 teams. Every draft slot in the first 10 rounds is assigned a dollar value, and the sum of a team’s draft slots decides its allotment.
“[We] think that [we] put the right kind of ingredients into the player-development systems to give us a chance for major-league players,” Oppenheimer said.
“And then we were able to spread out and do the depth that we think that we do a nice job in with some pitching further down that develops. Hopefully there’s a Cam Schlittler or a Will Warren or something like that that we nailed down there, too.”
The Yankees drafted the hard-throwing Schlittler in the seventh round in 2022 and fellow rookie right-hander Warren in the eighth round in 2021.
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