Long before they chose him with their first pick in this year’s draft, Arkansas left-hander Zach Root was being groomed for a job with the Dodgers.
“I couldn’t be happier. This was my favorite team growing up, and I’m happy to be a Dodger,” Root said after the Dodgers made him the 40th pick in the MLB draft on Sunday night.
“Growing up, my dad always made me watch (Clayton) Kershaw and learn to pitch like him. So I’ve just been watching Dodger baseball ever since I can remember because of Kershaw.”
In this era when velocity is king, Root goes against the trend – his fastball is not his best pitch. He threw it only a third of the time in college, relying more on a pitch assortment featuring a changeup, curveball and slider that produced 126 strikeouts in 99⅓ innings last season (fifth in NCAA Division I).
“(I’d describe myself as being) able to throw multiple pitches into the zone in any count, and that’s a big part of keeping hitters off-balance, not falling into patterns where the hitter can guess what’s coming,” Root said. “So just working to throw multiple pitches in the zone in any count, is the kind of pitcher I am, to keep the hitter off guard and really be tough to hit against.”
Root was the first of 14 pitchers taken by the Dodgers in their 21 picks during the 20-round draft that concluded Monday. Two of those pitchers fit a familiar draft-day theme for the Dodgers. Both second-rounder Cam Leiter out of Florida State (shoulder surgery) and 17th-rounder Sam Horn from Missouri (Tommy John surgery) were highly rated but slipped because of the injuries that impacted their college careers.
Leiter is the nephew of former major-league pitchers Mark and Al Leiter, and a cousin of current New York Yankees reliever Mark Leiter Jr. Horn was a four-star football recruit who played quarterback briefly in 2023 before missing all of 2024 in both sports while recovering from elbow surgery. He slipped in the draft over uncertainty about which sport he will pursue now.
The highest-drafted position player in the Dodgers’ draft class this year was Root’s Arkansas teammate Charles Davalan, who went on the next pick, 41st overall.
Davalan’s journey was a long one. He grew up in Montreal playing “a lot of hockey and then baseball on the side.” He “fell in love with baseball” and moved to Florida as a high school senior so that he could play year-round. After a year at Florida Gulf Coast, he transferred to Arkansas.
“As soon as I stepped on campus, really, it was super competitive,” he said of playing for a Razorback team that went 50-15 and reached the semifinals of the College World Series. “You had to kind of beat out, beat your teammates, and that’s what I learned. … You couldn’t take an AB off during the midweeks or even during the conference play, just because it’s SEC.”
The Dodgers took two more college outfielders in the third round (Landyn Vidourek from Cincinnati) and the 16th round (Seton Hall’s AJ Soldra).
The first high school player taken by the Dodgers this year was shortstop Aidan West from Long Beach, Maryland, their fourth-round pick.
The only other prep players the Dodgers selected were outfielder Mason Ligenza from Tamaqua Area, Pennsylvania (sixth round) and left-hander Shane Brinham from Vancouver (20th round).