The College Baseball season starts this weekend and with it ESPN.com has started a new draft blog, so this seems like a good time for a very early look at the 2009 draft.  The Giants have the 6th pick and in order to continue the re-building process they will need to continue their recent run of good drafting.  Keith Law from ESPN has his early top 32 list, and here are his top 6:

1. Stephen Strasburg, rhp, San Diego State
2. Alex White, rhp, North Carolina
3. Grant Green, ss, Southern California
4. Aaron Crow, rhp, Fort Worth Cats
5. Dustin Ackley, cf/1b, North Carolina
6. Kyle Gibson, rhp, Missouri

One obvious point is that while last year's draft was loaded with position players (15 of the top 18 picks were hitters) this year's draft is generally regarded as being very strong in college pitching.  It seems to me that 6th is a good place to be as there are 2 college hitters in a teir of their own and there is a pretty solid consensus top 4 college pitchers (counting Aaron Crow as a college pitcher) with Tanner Scheppers a possibility to move into that group if he is healthy, followed by a drop off.  The best High School player in the country, Donovan Tate, an OF from Georgia, is 8th on Law's list. 

here are a couple of other mock drafts for the sake of comparison

Personally, I would be thrilled to have any of those 6 guys on Law's list.  Grant Green would be my favorite but I would love to have any of the college pitchers.  I am a "best player available" absolutist so I would prefer the Giants take one of the college pitchers if they feel they are the best player available rather than taking a hitter for reasons of organizational depth.

There is nothing that people around here and consistently more wrong about than the MLB draft, so I thought it might be fun to see what people think, if for no other reason than so we can mock it next June.  Who do you think the Giants end up with, who do you hope they end up with (but please keep the wild scenarios of Strasburg falling to 6th because of signability to yourself).  I'll go with I hope we get Grant Green, and I predict we get Kyle Gibson.