Florida’s Wyatt Langford sits at No. 2 on my latest MLB Draft rankings, and was No. 1 earlier in the year before he fouled a ball off a bad place, which kept him out for two weeks but didn’t require surgery. He came back incredibly quickly and hasn’t let up at the plate, reaching base four more times when I saw him against Florida State at the Triple-A ballpark in Jacksonville on May 2.

Langford is a 70 runner with a beautiful right-handed swing that generates real power already — he hit 26 homers last year, tying him for sixth in the country with first-rounder Kevin Parada, and he’s already at 12 this year even with about seven missed games. He’s steady through contact with excellent hip rotation, getting his weight onto his front side without collapsing the back, and hitting the ball in the air a ton. He’s a disciplined hitter who doesn’t expand the zone much at all for any pitch type until he gets to two strikes, and even then he rarely misses. He plays left field in part because Florida has a plus defensive center fielder in redshirt freshman Michael Robertson, but more because Langford isn’t a natural or instinctive defender, even in left field. He’s so fast you’d think he could handle center, but we have seen guys with his speed (Derek Fisher comes to mind, and to a lesser extent Corey Ray) who just couldn’t carry it over to defense.

He’s not quite hitting at the pace of LSU’s Dylan Crews, but Langford is having an incredible year by non-Crews standards. Crews is second in Division I in on-base percentage and 14th in slugging; Langford is fifth in OBP and 17th in slugging, and both are doing it in the nation’s best conference. While Crews has the edge in production and defensive value, as he’s a center fielder, Langford is the better runner and athlete, and I would like to think he could get to average defense in left. Crews is the favorite to go 1-1, but Langford would be the 1-1 pick in the majority of draft years, and he’s got to be the best alternative for Pittsburgh if they want to try to negotiate with two players to strike the best deal.