Our top 10 Phillies draft picks of all time: Who ranks No. 1?

When the MLB draft gets underway Sunday night, there will be lights, cameras, and the action of a commissioner standing at a podium and calling out names.

There just won’t be the hype of the NFL or NBA drafts.

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Baseball prospects don’t play in bowl games or March Madness. Teams aren’t allowed to swap picks. And unlike in football and basketball, MLB draftees embark on a glamourless journey through the minor leagues. There’s no instant gratification. It can take five years to evaluate the success of a baseball draft.

It’s fun, though, to look back through past drafts. Here’s our list of the Phillies’ all-time best picks:

Most evaluators believed Nola had the ceiling of a mid-rotation starter. But the Phillies took him with the seventh overall pick because they thought he could reach the majors quickly after a standout college career at LSU. Not only did he get there in 13 months, but he’s had third-, fourth-, and seventh-place finishes in Cy Young voting since 2018.

Drafted out of Stanford as a third baseman, Boone switched positions in double A and caught 1,095 games for the Phillies, the third-highest total in franchise history. In 10 years with the team, he won two Gold Gloves and was a three-time All-Star. He also caught the final pitch of the 1980 World Series.

If not for a senior trip to Mexico in 1997, Phillies history may have been much different. Utley had so much fun with friends in Cabo San Lucas that he decided to keep the good times rolling in college at UCLA rather than taking the Dodgers’ second-round money. Three years later, the only question was whether he would still be on the board for the Phillies at No. 15 overall.

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Rollins had outsized talent in high school in Alameda, Calif., near Oakland, but there was one problem: He was barely 5½ feet tall. To assure the Phillies’ top evaluators wouldn’t dismiss Rollins without seeing him play, area scout Bob Poole jotted on his report that the shortstop was 5-foot-9. A little hyperbole went a long way toward landing the best shortstop in franchise history.

Score one for the Phillies medical staff. Other teams were scared off by Hamels’ health history, notably a fractured left arm two years earlier. But Phillies team physician Michael Ciccotti was close with the surgeon who reset the broken humerus bone by inserting two rods and assured Phillies evaluators that Hamels’ arm had healed properly. From 2007-14, Hamels averaged 31 starts and 209 innings per season.

As a wrestler, quarterback, and catcher, Daulton’s leadership qualities were evident even in high school. But he was undersized and underrated. He wound up with 22.9 wins above replacement, according to Baseball Reference, third-best of any 25th-rounder, trailing Mike Hargrove (30.3) and Paul Splittorff (23.0). It wasn’t Mike Piazza to the Dodgers in the 62nd round, but as draft finds go, it was impressive.

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Three years before Howard broke through at Southwest Missouri State, when he was still in high school, Phillies area scout Jerry Lafferty followed a tip from a former player and went to see him. Lafferty followed Howard over the years and advocated so loudly for his prodigious power that the Phillies ran out of reasons not to draft him. Howard’s peak, while short, was a five-year stretch that ranks with any slugger in history.

The question wasn’t whether Rolen could play third base in the majors. It was whether he would choose to go to University of Georgia to play basketball and baseball. Area scout Scott Trcka assured the Phillies that he could talk Rolen into signing if they drafted him. They did, and Trcka’s power of persuasion was strong. Rolen spent the first seven seasons of a 17-year major league career in Philadelphia and will be inducted into the Hall of Fame later this month.

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Most teams figured Sandberg would honor his commitment to play college football at Washington State, causing his draft stock to plummet. But the Phillies took a chance, backed it up with a $20,000 bonus that typically went to a second- or third-rounder, and added Sandberg to their farm system. If only they hadn’t traded him to the Cubs four years later, a Hall of Fame-level mistake.

Unsurprisingly, the best player in franchise history was also the best draft pick. Credit scout Tony Lucadello. He followed Schmidt from high school to Ohio University and didn’t abandon the trail after Michael Jack hit only one homer as a freshman. Looking back, the only question is how Schmidt — George Brett, too, drafted one pick earlier by the Royals — lasted until the second round.

» READ MORE: How the Phillies conquered a history of failure to capture the 1980 NLCS over the Astros