The draft is next week and the verbage is picking up. There’s a great Keith Law piece  on ESPN in which he calls this year’s top-shelf talent “subpar.” He goes on to say the strongest positions are corner infielders and, to a lesser degree, relief pitchers.

One of the reasons he gives for the subpar talent class is the fact that several players who opted to continue to college, didn’t improve while playing in the NCAA.

But Justin Bristow (East Carolina) and Jordan Danks (Texas) had chances to go in the first round in 2005, and will be lucky to be first-day drafts this year, and David Adams (Virginia), Brett Jacobson, and Zach Putnam (Michigan) also lost ground in the three years they spent in school.

Starting at noon CST Saturday Jon Sickles Minor League Ball blog will be conducting a mock draft with different readers representing each MLB team. SaberScouting has issued a very readable Top 25, which includes pros, cons and comparisons, with a promise to expand it to a Top 100 in the coming days. And MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo is covering the day to day activity on his site.

Yesterday Mayo posted an interesting rumor, saying that the Rays have narrowed their choice to either Buster Posey or Pedro Alvarez. Word is, if the team takes Alvarez, a thirdbaseman out of Vanderbilt, it could prompt a future move to second for Evan Longoria.

I also want to recommend, for  the second day in a row, Paul DePodesta’s  site, where he’s  got an interesting behind-the-scenes post  about what major league teams are doing  in the immediate runup to the draft. He  details the different scouting positions — regional crosscheckers,  area supervisors, national crosscheckers, and scouting directors, and what they’re doing right now.