This is where it has to start sticking.

The Padres on Monday spent the third overall pick in the amateur draft on high school pitcher MacKenzie Gore.

A lot can go wrong between now and the young left-hander’s first professional pitch from the mound at Petco Park. Even more can veer off course before he toes the rubber in a Padres postseason game we’ve been told will happen at some point in most of our lifetimes.

A baseball draft pick’s journey is far more fickle and fraught with risk than in any other sport. As often as not, if not more, it’s just the kind of game that wears a player down mentally while it beats him down physically.


You want guaranteed returns? Baseball drafting is like an investor doing his due diligence and then flipping a coin to decide which stock to purchase.

That said, you don’t miss with this type of pick. You just don’t.

Not when you’ve been living on the bottom and you’re sick of it and you’ve promised your fans that this plan is going to pay off.

Sorry. No. This kid needs to live up to scouts’ comparisons to Clayton Kershaw.


We can’t tolerate anything less. Not so much to put the pressure on Gore, but definitely to place it on the shoulders of Padres General Manager A.J. Preller.

Last year, Preller made his first first-round selections. He and his staff, in fact, made three picks in the first 25 spots and selected six times in the first 85 turns in the 2016 draft. Then they went about loading up the minor leagues by selling off major league parts and investing a stunning amount in the international market.

That summer certainly marked the launch of the Padres’ acknowledged building process.

Monday took the project to a new level. Hyperdrive.


The third pick is the kind of pick that better change things. And relatively quickly.

The third pick is a player who is supposed to get to the big leagues in a big hurry. If your personnel department is what you hope it is, it’s also a player who makes a difference.

Since 2007, Manny Machado, Eric Hosmer and Trevor Bauer are among those selected third overall.

Machado made his big-league debut two years after being drafted and played his first full season and made the first of his three All-Star games just three years after the Orioles selected him. Hosmer was the American League Rookie of the Year in 2011, three years after being taken by the Royals. Bauer, selected in 2011, is in his fourth season as a starter for the Cleveland Indians.


Those are timelines the Padres can live with. They can even wait a bit longer for Gore. They will almost certainly have to.

Bauer was drafted out of UCLA. Machado and Hosmer were high schoolers, but they were also position players.

A high school pitcher making the leap effectively in a couple or three years is far from unprecedented but is wholly unexpected.

Kershaw, the seventh overall pick in 2006, made 21 starts two seasons after being drafted and won the first of his three Cy Young awards in 2011.


That’s something to shoot for.

But none of the high school pitchers taken in the 2014 or ’15 drafts have made it to the majors yet. Two years, it just doesn’t happen. Three is rare.

Tyler Danish, the White Sox’s second-round pick in 2013, is the only high school pitcher from that draft to have made his debut, having done so last June.

Seven of the 28 pitchers who signed after being taken in the first three rounds of the 2012 draft have pitched in the majors. Among those is Lance McCullers Jr., who is a key part of the Houston Astros’ rotation. He made his debut in May 2015.


If Gore is even a slight manifestation of Kershaw and achieves what McCullers has to date, this will be a successful pick.

If by 2020, Gore is reminding us of Tate, Preller has been fired.

Look, it’s almost impossible to completely whiff on this pick.

Between ’07 and ’14, just one player selected third did not make the big leagues. That was, without even a trace of surprise, a pick exercised by the Padres. Donavan Tate, who got a then-record signing bonus from the Padres, never made it past Single-A due to injuries and substance abuse issues. He is now a freshman quarterback at the University of Arizona.


And, yes, there is some justification in pointing out that the Padres have been perhaps the worst team in the history of the draft. No exaggeration. An analysis by the Union-Tribune’s Jeff Sanders last year showed the average WAR of 3.86 for the Padres’ 70 first-round picks since their inception was second-worst all-time. And since the lowest-ranked Chicago Cubs have recently done OK with their drafts, we can safely assess the Padres’ drafts to have been the most fruitless.

But history is also irrelevant in this context. Those horrid drafts weren’t conducted by this regime.

This group, led by Preller, is finally all in. And with this pick they move to neck deep.

Monday was the first time since ’09 the Padres have picked as high as third, and they almost certainly will pick this high again next year. They had the majors’ second-worst record entering Monday night’s game.


Those type of picks in successive years are what justify the banking – not tanking – organizational strategy. You sink this low so you can get this high.

It stinks for the coaching staff and players trying every day to win. (Thus, we don’t use the term “tanking” in this space; it is “banking” for the future.) But it is the types of players acquired with the capital earned on the backs of this collection of largely subpar players that is the catalyst for an about-face.

Yes, the Padres better invest in some veteran talent when they think they’re close to contending. Signing a top-notch starter or a veteran bat to fill out the infield will be imperative. It might be what gets the Padres over the top. But drafting and developing their own players is what will get the Padres close to that summit – and keep them there.

Hopefully, the Padres don’t have to stink as woefully and as long as the Houston Astros did in order to get the No.1 overall pick in 2012, ’13 and ’14 and the No. 2. pick in ’15. But the Astros have certainly shown what a drastic turnaround looks like when a couple of those picks (plus a few other high selections and a superstar international signee) become the core of your lineup quickly. Houston made the playoffs two years ago, finished above. 500 last season and have the majors’ best record this year.


If Preller & Co. nailed these two picks – this year and next – the chances are good the Padres will get where they want to be. At least, they will be contenders.

If not, it Gore is another Padres bust, well, we’re familiar with what happens then.

kevin.acee@sduniontribune.com