2018 MLB Mock Draft Updated For May 18, 2018

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Roughly an hour after the Tigers announce Casey Mize is the top pick, the 2018 draft’s game of chicken should begin.

Teams are understandably leery of drafting high school righthanders at the top of the draft. The track record of top of the draft prep righthanders has been frightening for much of the past decade. But if everyone follows that approach, teams will soon exhaust the pool of college and high school bats and college arms who carry legit first-round grades.

And so then the game of chicken begins. There have always been advantages to running counter to groupthink in baseball. There are teams who will dive in and take a righthander because on pure talent they are rated better on their board than anyone else available. Other teams will stay away, preferring to take a second-tier college bat instead of a much higher-risk high school arm.

Last year, only two high school righthanders were taken in the first round. This draft is too deep in that demographic to see a repeat of those numbers, but there’s little doubt that Ethan Hankins, Cole Winn, Carter Stewart, Kumar Rocker and several others are facing a tougher path than they would have five years ago.

This draft has a clear No. 1 and a more stratified group of college bats and arms that are rising to the top, but after that it should be a wild first round.