Elias talks about the upcoming amateur draft

Orioles executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias indicated this afternoon that the club has narrowed its list of choices to four players for the first-overall pick in the First-Year Player Draft that begins Monday.

Elias won't mention any names, but three of those players certainly are Oregon State catcher Adley Rutschman, prep shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. and University of California first baseman Andrew Vaughn.

More of the organization's scouts will gather this weekend in the warehouse. They've been trickling into the facility.

Here's a sampling from Elias:

On whether he's made a decision: "Nothing's really changed. The draft is still three days away and we have a lot of time. A lot of the players we're considering for the first pick are playing this weekend, and we're going to monitor that and take it down ... There's no reason to make the decision prior to when we have to make the decision, so we're really spending a lot of our time discussing those candidates but also preparing for the draft, which is a meticulous process. We have a good bit of our scouting staff here now and the remainder of the staff will start arriving in town tomorrow. We'll have a full staff for the draft itself."

On how many players he's seriously considering: "I'd say it's about four players right now and we're keeping our eye on the guys who are continuing to play through the weekend. We're still talking through it."

On whether this is done to make sure no one is injured: "That could happen. Hopefully that's not the case, but maybe somebody will hit 10 home runs, too. I don't know. But as I said, there's really no utility in making a decision four days prior to the draft or three days prior to the draft. So we'll make it the day of the draft."

On how unusual it is to have little pitching at the top portion of the draft: "It's a pretty hitting-heavy draft at the top, but also I think I read that Jim Callis or somebody thought there would be a record number of position players taken in the first round as a whole, so that is unusual. I don't know if it's an aberration or what, but yeah, there's a lot of good hitters this year and fewer pitchers who are first-round material."

On whether signability is a factor: "Yeah, it's important to have a real clear idea of what that's going to look like, especially in the top 10 rounds, because your bonus pool is so precarious. So we do a lot of advance work with that, and usually the area scout will get on the phone with the player's camp and just make sure we have a pretty clear understanding, and sometimes later in the draft on the third day you'll take guys on fliers with no idea if they're going to sign, or kind of a hope and a prayer that they're going to sign at the end of the summer. But that's becoming rarer and rarer just because the signing deadline is earlier than it used to be and there's only, like, a month where you'd have the kid under control, so not a lot changes in a month."

On how having one of the larger signing pools is an advantage: "It's a big advantage. If we end up using every dollar of it just kind of straight up, meaning for each player that it's slotted for, great. That means we really like those guys and we got them. And if it ends up to where we're pushing some of that money around and maybe signing a high school player later in the draft as his talent dictates, or a college sophomore with a little bit of a price tag, that would be good, too. It's impossible to predict. It just depends where guys go in the draft. But we do anticipate using the full pool."

On whether the Orioles could spend more than allotted amount: "There is that possibility. It's not something we do just to do. And I've had years where we end up tapping into that and other times when we don't. So if it's worthwhile to do it, we'll do it, but there are pretty heavy penalties attached to it, so you've really got to be sure you want to do it."

On how this process has been for Elias and staff: "It's been good. Coming in in November and December, I hadn't plugged in with the staff or had an idea what our level of preparation or infrastructure would look like, but we've managed to get things really well organized. I feel like we've got all the players we want on the board, we've got the information well organized, the medical team has been great. We've got an analytics group chipping in, we've got input from our player-development staff, and Brad Ciolek's done a really good job managing the day-to-day of the department and preparing all this input, so it's really a lot. It's hard to describe what a process it is going into the baseball draft. There are so many players and so much paperwork and information chasing around and schedules and worrying about weather. It's a heck of an endeavor. There's a lot of teamwork involved."

On whether he's learning anything from the process: "It would be hard for me to encapsulate everything that I've learned in the draft over 10-plus years or whatever, but it's always changing, it's different every year, and we just try to bring our brains to process as best we can."

On second pick: "We're picking 42nd, and typically what we'll do in that scenario is make sure we've got 45 names that we'd be comfortable taking there and, in case some of those guys end up not being signable or something, we have enough names. I have some idea of eight or 10 that might be more likely to be there than others, but it's just from hearing things around the game and reading mock drafts like everybody does. And you never know. So we're very meticulous in stacking up all 40-plus names and making sure we have them in the right order, because you can't just assume somebody's going to be gone."

On how many times he's seen the four players considered for first pick: "Over the last calendar year I was Astros scouting director all summer, so I saw all of them play over the summer dozens of times. And then this spring I saw probably two or three games personally from each of those kids, and that's in addition to the reams of video that we have available to us now, so I'm not lacking for looks."

On how underslotting has changed: "The Carlos Correa perfect storm thing that happened, I don't know if that will ever happen again. No. 1, it was the first year of this new system. No. 2, we had this belief that he was the best player in the draft, but he thought he was going, like, sixth or seventh, which is a rare thing. And then also the spread between the bonuses that first year was a lot bigger than it was now. So to have something that dramatic happen again, I don't know that we'll see that again and have it work out on top of it. We're going to focus on taking who we think is the right pick and we'll just kind of see how it all falls."

On whether he could take one of the top players instead of someone lower to underslot: "Again, this is a decision that's going to happen a few days from now and there's a lot of factors. There's a lot of moving parts. And I just can't predict right now even in terms of a strategy which way we're going to (go)."

On how much this pick will define Elias and the player: "I don't look at it that way at all. It's a draft. There's a menu of players at the top of the draft, it's kind of different every year, so there's only so much control that I have over who's available and the type of player it is. But in terms of defining the player having gone first, I do think it's a really dramatic thing for a player to be the first pick. There's a lot of benefits to it. But there's also a lot of pressures and attentions that the player has to shoulder and really want to embrace."

On international signings: "We've been working since we got here on international. It's different than the draft in that it's a rolling, ongoing thing every day where we're doing stuff internationally. I do expect that on July 2 when the signing period begins we're going to sign some players, and I think we're going to sign more players after that and I'm looking forward to being part of that process. But it's not news that comes out right now."

On whether he thinks there's one player in the draft who's head and shoulders above the others: "There's different ways of looking at it, and you would be surprised when you get into a draft room and you have 30 people weighing in, the lack of consensus that can occur. So we hear all about how we think about things. We probably overthink about things too much, but it's a big decision, so we'll do the best we can."