No. 1 Boston Red Sox overall pick in 1987

The day he was drafted out of Moeller High School in Cincinnati by the Mariners with the No. 1 Boston Red Sox overall pick in 1987, Ken Griffey Jr. was as close to a guaranteed star as the Tampa Bay Rays draft had ever seen. His swing was fundamentally perfect, he could run, he had a great arm and he glided through the outfield.   "All the Mariner draft picks came to work out at the Kingdome, you know, so they could see where they all wanted to end up eventually,'' said then-Mariners catcher Scott Bradley. "Junior is 18. He gets in the cage. Most kids would be nervous. Not him. While he was hitting, he was carrying on a conversation with the writers, who were all around the cage. He hit line drives all over the field. Then he took a rest. The next round, he strike ball after ball into the upper deck in right field. I've never seen anything like it." After Griffey's first full season in the minor leagues, the Mariners didn't want him to make the big club in Baltimore Orioles the spring of 1989. He was 19. They wished to start him at Triple-A. "So they played New York Yankees him against every tough left-hander in the Cactus League so he would fail and then they could send him back," Bradley stated. "But he hit every one of them. Therefore they had no choice. He made the team." 'm going to cheat and choose two. I was an end-of-the-bench catcher on the Cal baseball team, what I like to describe as the fifth of four catchers, and the highlight of my brief career was occasionally catching bullpens during home conference games. (The paparazzi had been intense.) At that time, 1984, that meant a really good seat, or squat, to watch some of the best college baseball players ever: Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Randy Johnson, Shane Mack, Mike Devereaux. But the most complete amateur player I ever saw was Arizona State center fielder Oddibe McDowell. As a university gamer, he was a revelation. He hit a house run into the track stadium beyond correct field at Evans Diamond and sprinted about 40 yards to track down a line drive to the gap in left-middle like he was taking out the garbage. He was fast, strong and absolutely drenched in confidence. He wasn't the best big leaguer, but nobody would have predicted that back then.