Lucky 17s? How Roy Halladay, Brad Lidge, and Cole Hamels got drafted in the spot where the Phillies pick this year.

At roughly 10 p.m. Sunday, the Phillies will make the 17th pick in the Major League Baseball draft, and as usual, it will come with a disclaimer.

“Most of these guys are at least 12 months away,” Phillies scouting director Brian Barber said this week. “And a lot of them are 36, 48 months away.”

Remember that. Jot it down. This isn’t the NFL or the NBA, where first-round picks enter the league immediately and are expected to make an impact. Bryce Harper didn’t get to the majors for 22 months after the draft. Neither did Max Scherzer. Mike Trout didn’t arrive for 25 months. Aaron Judge 38.

So, yes, it takes time.

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But the odds of making it, eventually, are relatively favorable for first-rounders. Not counting the last four years, 36 of the 53 No. 17 picks got to the majors — and three left an indelible mark on Phillies history.

In 2002, the last time the Phillies picked 17th, they selected Cole Hamels. Ten years before Brad Lidge threw the World Series-clinching pitch, he got drafted 17th overall by the Houston Astros in 1998. And the all-time greatest 17th pick came three years before that, when the Toronto Blue Jays nabbed a Colorado high school pitcher named Roy Halladay.

“It seems like there’s always four or five sure-things, but middle of the first round, there’s no guarantees,” Lidge said this week. “Typically you’re going to get a great talent, and then, it’s kind of up to the player development at that point to really get them to the next level.”

In anticipation of the Phillies’ calling out the name of this year’s No. 17, let’s look back at the process that led to the selections of Halladay, Lidge, and Hamels.

Tim Wilken attended one of Halladay’s starts for Arvada West High in suburban Denver in the spring of 1995.

It was all he needed to see.

Wilken, then a national crosschecker for the Blue Jays, wrote a report — in all caps — that Halladay was a “power pitcher with good pitching balance and two plus plus power pitches with good command and very good ability to repeat his delivery. Will get stronger. Competes well and good feel.” He punctuated it with two words: “1ST ROUND.”

Among all the players that he saw that year, Wilken ranked Halladay behind only Ariel Prieto, a 25-year-old pitcher who defected from Cuba and went straight to the majors.

“Shame on me,” Wilken said by phone. “Maybe I should’ve had Roy on top of him.”

» READ MORE: Ten years later, Roy Halladay’s perfect game lives on with the Phillies, Marlins, and so many others who were there

But there wasn’t unanimity about Halladay within the Blue Jays draft room.

Some team officials thought Halladay had what Wilken described as “one-piece arm action,” not enough bend in his elbow to command his pitches, particularly a knuckle-curve. Wilken was adamant. He contended that Halladay was a better athlete than people thought and had uncommonly good body control to repeat his delivery.

It wouldn’t have mattered for the Blue Jays if the Pittsburgh Pirates did what most teams guessed they would and selected outfielder Reggie Taylor with the 10th overall pick. Wilken was certain the Phillies would’ve taken Halladay if Taylor didn’t fall to them at No. 14. But the Pirates drafted shortstop Chad Hermansen and Taylor was there when the Phillies picked.

“They ended up taking Reggie Taylor, thank heavens,” Wilken said. “And that’s how Roy got to our pick.”

Wilken and the Blue Jays’ other Halladay backers proved to be correct. There were potholes along the way, including a well-known demotion back to single-A ball and mechanical adjustments with pitching coach Mel Queen. But Halladay finished his career with 65.4 WAR, according to FanGraphs, and went to the Hall of Fame.

“There was a lot of in-house argument because it wasn’t a slam dunk,” Wilken said. “I just really believed — and enough of our people believed — in Roy.”

Lidge arrived at Notre Dame in 1995 as more of a curiosity than a prospect. A converted outfielder with a strong arm, his velocity gradually ticked upward, from 91 mph to 93 and later 95. Scouts were intrigued, if not always impressed.

It wasn’t until Lidge’s junior year that anyone mentioned him as a potential pick in the top five or six rounds. Then came his big break: an early-season start against powerhouse University of Miami, with blue-chippers Aubrey Huff, Bobby Hill, and future No. 1 overall pick Pat Burrell.

“I got absolutely torched,” Lidge said. “Just blown up.”

But Lidge also cranked his fastball to 96 mph, even scraping 97, with a promising curveball. The stuff wasn’t a problem. He began to get second- and third-round buzz, when Baseball America released midseason rankings that rated Lidge’s fastball as the best in the draft class.

“That really helped put me in that first-round discussion,” Lidge said. “It picked up so much momentum so fast in the last two months of the spring. I went from like a fifth-round pick to possibly a first-round pick.”

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On draft day, Lidge had friends and family over to his house. Based on how much contact he had with the White Sox before the draft, he felt confident they would take him at No. 16. He had even flown to Chicago to throw a bullpen session.

“Back then we had dial-up internet and we were trying to follow along and stuff, and the 16th pick comes up and [the White Sox] took [pitcher] Kip Wells,” Lidge recalled. “And I was like, ‘Oh no! How far am I going to fall now?’”

Lidge thought maybe the Anaheim Angels would be his parachute at No. 18. With the Astros on the clock, he wasn’t expecting the phone to ring. He spoke with a few of their scouts during the season but said Houston was “not the team I thought would be most likely to take me.”

Surprise.

“Honestly, I was sweating it a little bit,” said Lidge, who moved to the bullpen in the minors, changed his arm angle, scrapped the curveball for a slider, and racked up 225 saves in 11 major league seasons. “You hear stories that sometimes people think they’re going in the first round and they wind up falling to the third or fourth. Once the White Sox passed, I was like, ‘Uh-oh.’ So, it was a huge relief. I remember feeling overjoyed at that moment.”

Going into the 2002 draft, nobody doubted Hamels’ ability. His fastball ranked with any thrown by a high school senior and he had a bat-slowing changeup that separated him from the pack.

But what about his health?

Two years earlier, as a sophomore at Rancho Bernardo High School in San Diego, Hamels unleashed a pitch and snapped his left arm, which made a sound that he has often described as “like a tree branch breaking.” He went to the emergency room, where X-rays revealed a fractured humerus, the long bone that runs from the shoulder to the elbow. Doctors told him he’d never pitch again.

Hamels saw Padres team physician Jan Fronek, who reset the bone by inserting two rods. Hamels missed one season, then took the mound as a senior and dominated.

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Still, scouts had questions. Would Hamels’ arm hold up to the rigors of pro ball?

“Somebody would’ve taken him ahead of us had everybody felt totally comfortable and there’d been no injury,” former Phillies assistant general manager Mike Arbuckle said two years ago. “There’s a very decent chance we would never have gotten him.”

Eight pitchers, including four high schoolers, came off the board before Hamels. But the Phillies didn’t hesitate to scoop him up at No. 17, sign him to a $2 million bonus, and watch him anchor the rotation for 10 years.

Arbuckle credits the team’s confidence to the diligence of longtime scout Darrell Conner, the only evaluator in attendance for Hamels’ first start back as a senior. But there was another reason Hamels didn’t slip on the Phillies’ draft board. Team physician Michael Ciccotti is close with Fronek, according to Arbuckle, and Fronek assured Ciccotti that Hamels’ arm had healed properly.

“Michael said, ‘I have no reservations about this guy physically,’” Arbuckle recalled. “He said, ‘That arm, the bone is probably stronger than it was before. You have total clearance from me [that Hamels] is a low-risk guy.’ I’ve got to give Michael Ciccotti credit in a significant way for giving us the comfort level to go out and take Cole in the first round where a lot of other teams were knocking him down.

“That’s where the team physician probably should get an award.”

Hamels’ 2008 World Series MVP is enough for both of them.