Pete Alonso is part of a fresh look back at the 2016 MLB Draft, and the focus falls on Mickey Moniak and Nick Senzel. redid the first 30 picks and put both at the top of its list of misses.
That ranking starts with the simplest ledger: Moniak and Senzel went 1-2, yet neither made the kind of impact their drafting franchises wanted. The gap between draft slot and production is the whole story here.
Moniak and Senzel at 1-2
Moniak was the Phillies’ top pick in 2016. He played sparingly for the Phillies before getting to the 100-plus game plateau with the Angels at age 26.
His best stretch came with the Rockies, where he was on pace for his best MLB season with a.942 OPS in 43 games. That is the kind of late rise that can change how a former first overall pick is remembered, even after years of limited use in Philadelphia.
Phillies Picks After Moniak
The Phillies did not stop after the top selection. They used over-slot deals on Kevin Gowdy and Cole Stobbe with their next two picks, then later found JoJo Romero and Cole Irvin in the fourth and fifth rounds.
That draft path makes the Moniak choice look even harsher in context. The club got more useful big-league value from later rounds than from the player taken first overall, which is the sort of imbalance a redraft is designed to expose.
Nick Senzel’s Long Slide
Senzel entered the class as a top-10 player, but the numbers turned quickly against him. He reached 500 PA in 2017 and never reached 500 PA in any single year after that.
The Reds moved him around the diamond until they outrighted him in November 2023. He was with the Dodgers this spring and was released in May.
For readers trying to understand the redraft, the lesson is blunt: first-round status can vanish fast when the production never matches the slot. The question left by this re-ranking is which players from the re-drafted top 30 pushed Moniak and Senzel aside, and why those choices aged better.
Moniak’s Late Value
Moniak still matters because his career did not stop at the Phillies’ doorstep. He reached the 100-plus game plateau with the Angels at age 26 and carried a.942 OPS in 43 games with the Rockies, a line that shows how uneven but still live his path has been.
That is the tension in the draft revisit: the names at the top were supposed to define the class, but the best returns often surfaced later, in smaller bursts, and sometimes with other teams. Pete Alonso sits inside that broader reordering, while Moniak and Senzel remain the clearest reminders of how badly the first two picks missed their original projections.
