MORGANTOWN — It took 200 picks before Major League Baseball finally got around to realizing they play the game in West Virginia, too.

That was when the Athletics — not quite sure what city to identify as their home, especially since they’ve already called Philadelphia, Kansas City and Oakland home in their history — got around to drafting catcher Logan Sauve.

Remember, this WVU was the Big 12’s regular season champion. It was a nationally ranked team. It was — until the last two weeks of the season — probably the best team ever to play at WVU.

But they must have been doing it with mirrors, for it took until the middle of the second day before they got around to taking a Mountaineer player.

Think of it this way.

There were three high school players taken in the first round …

Whoa, let’s reword that. There were three players from the same high school taken in the first round.

That would be Corona High, which is located about 50 miles east of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Makes you wonder if Shohei Ohtani is really the best player in his own neighborhood.

The Pirates pulled off the first of the Corona triumvirate of players when they drafted pitcher Seth Hernandez with the 6th pick of the draft, one picked higher than WVU’s JJ Wetherholt went last year. This may be another Skenes for the Pirates, seeing as he was 9=1 this spring with an 0.39 ERA while striking out the incredibly high 105 batters in just 53.1 innings while walking an equally incredibly low 7 batters.

The others taken were shortstop Billy Carson by the Chicago White Sox with the No. 10 pick and third baseman Brady Ebel, son of the Dodgers’ third base coach Dino Ebel, with the 32nd pick by the Milwaukee Brewers.

As incredible as it is to believe this was the first time three players from the same high school went in the first round, it is even more incredible to understand they somehow found a way to lose three games during the year and didn’t win the state championship.

But this is how baseball is. It’s the sport that really developed analytics, that now thrives on it, yet that always lived off a group of nomad scouts who live out of the trunk of their cars, sit behind home plate with radar guns and make judgments on what they see of players.

As far as we have come with computerized scouting, nothing beats Howie Haak’s ability to convince the Pirates to draft Roberto Clemente away from the Dodgers for $5,000 or for Montreal’s Bill MacKenzie to follow up on a telephone tip about a player in Florida they had no record of who turned out to be Hall of Fame player Tim Raines.

Scouts feel players.

Which brings us back to Logan Sauve.

Like Eben, his father, Jeffery was a professional athlete. After a two-sport career at Clemson he went on to pitch two years in the Red Sox system and played two seasons with the Green Bay Packers.

Now WVU knew what it had in Suave. If you can think back to new coach Steve Sabins’ preseason press conference this year, he noted that Suave was “a flat out rock star.”

He was the heart and soul of the team that Wetherholt was the previous year plus he was behind the pitching staff, the rotation which was all new to him as a catcher.

He set as his goal for the year to become friends with all of them, to win their trust, their confidence and to guide them through the year.

Suave went through the draft process last year before withdrawing to return to WVU for another year, a decision he says “was the best of my life.”

Now he’ll head into the true professional game, although there will be Mountaineer football and basketball players who will earn more than him playing this year, even though he will be in the minor leagues.