The top 40 players in town.
Taking the Rangers, Mavs, Stars, and Cowboys, and conducting a superdraft.
Over these first 11 months of the old-school Newberg Report reboot, we’ve brought back some regular features (semi-annual Top 72’s; rapid-fire TROT COFFEY’s in late July and early December; Ruben Amaro Jr. phone calls; run-on sentences) and introduced a bunch of new ones (Three Up, Three Down gamers; Sunday Hops; regular Mailbags; the “Building the Rangers roster” series).
I wanted to come up with something else for the post-holidays/pre-camp month and a half. A feature — a challenge — that I could revisit every year and have some fun with (and maybe kickstart some debates in the Comments).
I ventured off the Rangers page in October with a Cowboys rant, and I was shocked at the metrics, in terms of both the number of eyes on the story and the depth of the reader interaction. (Similar activity when I decided to do Mavericks and Stars playoff gamers.) Still, I have no plans to do a ton of dedicated entries that have nothing Rangers-related.
But combining them sounded like fun.
So I decided to conduct a draft — a 40-round effort to slot, the way I see it, the best players on the Rangers, Mavs, Stars, and Cowboys.
I wanted to make it a little more challenging than a straight ranking. So I’m doing this with a Draft Day mentality, almost as if I’m the beneficiary, along with one or three other teams in each sport, of an expansion draft setup. How am I going to staff my teams, if like MLB’s (Devil) Rays and Diamondbacks (1997), the NFL’s Jaguars and Panthers (1995), the NBA’s Grizzlies and Raptors (1995), or the NHL’s Wild and Blue Jackets (2000), I have to worry that the other team will take a player I want before I’m back on the clock? I’m also probably not overloading on depth at one position and leaving a critical position untreated altogether.
And another thing: contracts matter. So taking Dak Prescott means I’m taking on that payroll hit, and the roster constraints it imposes. And I also get Wyatt Langford’s five years of control.
By the way, if a player has already begun his final season in town before hitting unrestricted free agency, I didn’t include him. So, love ya, DeMarcus Lawrence and Rico Dowdle and Osa Odighizuwa and Matt Duchene and Dante Exum and Jamie Benn and Zack Martin (plus others for whom I didn’t have quite enough love to consider for this list), but we’re limiting this exercise to players the team has the ability to keep around at least another season (including several restricted free agents).
Let’s get things rolling. Like the LeBron draft, the Burrow draft, the Bryce draft, the Bedard draft, the first pick is the only one I didn’t have to think about too long.
1. Luka Dončić (age 25, contract through 2025-26 [plus 2026-27 player option])
The 13U Dallas Pelicans had practice from 6:00 until 8:00 pm on Thursday, June 21, 2018. Because it had just started getting hot in Dallas, Coach Tovar told the boys that though practice was (always) in full baseball gear, they could substitute navy Pelicans shorts for their standard baseball pants.
I had to look all of that up in my email. What I didn’t have to look up, because it’s emblazoned in my mind forever, is that when my group of three in one of the four Richardson High School batting cages was rotating to another station, I checked my phone to see how the first few picks of the NBA Draft had just played out and said to Max, whose group was getting set up in another of the cages: “They didn’t get Bamba.” He and I were both more than a little disappointed.
I just now checked a text exchange I had from earlier that day with a current MLB GM. He’d asked who I thought the Mavs, situated with the fifth overall pick, would draft that night. I said Jaren Jackson Jr. or Mo Bamba, and that “trading up to 3 scare[d] me.” (Such a deal with the Hawks had been rumored all day.) Why, he asked? Me: “Because I’m not sure the difference between Dončić and the two bigs is worth the trade-up cost.”
Dončić, Bamba, and Jackson have since combined for:
Five First-Team All-NBA selections
Six All-Star teams
One NBA scoring title
One NBA Finals appearance
One Conference Finals MVP Award
One Rookie of the Year Award
80 triple-doubles
Jackson has made one All-Star team.
Signed,
A baseball writer
2. Corey Seager (age 30, contract through 2031)
Hindsight is fun. And in this case, it belongs to a bunch of teams that aren’t the Texas Rangers.
The Mets took Francisco Lindor off the market headed into the 2021 season, but the shortstop class that coming winter was still insane. Here’s what’s happened with the five marquee free agents at the position in the three seasons since:
Corey Seager (15.7 WAR): World Series title, World Series MVP, second-place finish for American League MVP, 15th-place finish for American League MVP, three All-Star teams, one Silver Slugger, one-time AL lead in runs
Marcus Semien (17.0 WAR): World Series title, third-place finish for American League MVP, two All-Star teams, one Silver Slugger, one-time AL lead in WAR, one-time AL lead in hits, one-time AL lead in runs
Carlos Correa (10.4 WAR): one All-Star team (and 11 games played the rest of that season)
Trevor Story (4.0 WAR): .232/.296/.397 slash line (.693 OPS) in 163 games played . . . total
Javier Báez (1.8 WAR): .221/.262/.347 slash line (.610 OPS), a strikeout every 4.2 plate appearances, and an unintentional walk about a sixth as often as that
Fun fact: The Rangers had zeroed in on two high school players they planned to go very big on with their supplemental first-round pick in 2012, situated at 39th overall, if their bonus demands engineered a slide: Seager and Joey Gallo. The Dodgers made that moot by taking Seager 18th; Texas then selected high school outfielder Lewis Brinson 29th and paid him slot to sign — and drafted Gallo at No. 39, paying him $2.25 million, which was nearly double-slot. (Seager got a slightly-above-slot $2.35 million from Los Angeles 21 picks earlier.)
Anyway.
I am quite certain I will never not love Corey Seager for what he helped my baseball team achieve in 2023.
And here’s the thing: I have a meaningful degree of confidence there’s more to never not love him for ahead.
3. CeeDee Lamb (age 25, contract through 2028)
Speaking of the third and fifth picks in the draft (the Hawks, picking third in that 2018 draft, sent Dončić to Dallas for Trae Young and a 2019 first-rounder, which turned out to be Cam Reddish, now playing for his fourth team), the third and fifth picks on this list gave me the two happiest Draft Day moments of my life since the Cowboys chose Troy Aikman (when I was Max’s age).