Bryce Harper‘s last minute signing for something not quite as stratospheric as was requested by Boras ($6.25M bonus, $9.9M 5year contract) caps off a phenomenal draft for the Nats. Going in, pundits were giving the team little chance to sign 4th rounder AJ Cole or 12th rounder Robbie Ray (both high end HS prospects with strong college commitments). Even 2nd rounder Sammy Solis would be tough; his injury history knocked him out of the 1st round and there is always a chance with such guys that they’ll stick around for their senior year to increase their draft status (this is exactly what happened with our 14th rounder Timothy Smalling, a SS from Va Tech. He has a shoulder injury, meaning he dropped from the 10th round and the nats weren’t offering 10th round signing money. He’ll play his senior season and try to increase his value).
In the end, the nats got 25 of their first 26 round draft picks to sign. They paid overslot for Cole, far overslot for Ray and got them in the fold. I say bravo to the Nats for ignoring the edicts from the Commissioner’s office to pay slot money (this the same commissioner who basically ran the team into the ground between 2002 and 2004, somewhat leading to our current predicament today in terms of lack of talent from those drafts), preferring instead to spend more money than ever before to get commits from players who can change the course of the franchise.
Great day today.
One last note. I realize we’ll have this “signing day dance” no matter what actual calendar day is selected, and certainly this is a better system than what existed before a signing deadline day was picked (before, the benchmark was whether a player had begun to attend classes at whatever college they committed to, which led to all sorts of shenanigans and really wasn’t fair to Div-I programs who had a guy on campus ready to attend classes then suddenly was playing rookie league ball in florida 2 days later). But the next collective bargaining agreement HAS to move this date up.
High end guys like Harper, Sammy Solis and Cole have now basically wasted an entire pro season of development because they knew they could squeeze more money out of teams by waiting til the end. Plus, MLB “asks” teams to delay announcing over-slot deals so that there’s not a feeding frenzy of agents going “well player X got $2M so my guy should get $2.1M” all summer. Here’s the current major dates on the GM baseball calendar:
- The draft is held the first week of June (June 5-7 this year)
- The all-star break is usually the 2nd week of july (this year it was july 11-15th)
- And then the (non-waiver) trade deadline is July 31st.
- The current draft signing deadline is 8/15 (unless it falls on a weekend, then its pushed out like it was in 2010).
From a GM perspective, a ton of work leads up to the trade deadline so you can’t put it between the all star break and the end of july. Why not put the trade deadline somewhere in the first week of july? The 2 weeks immediately following the draft are spent signing the low-end/college senior prospects already; once that is done why not just play the Scott Boras dance, get the kid signed by July 7th, and have the kid playing by mid july?
Boss