{"id":9583,"date":"2014-07-18T07:52:53","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T11:52:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9583"},"modified":"2014-07-18T07:52:53","modified_gmt":"2014-07-18T11:52:53","slug":"are-the-nats-going-to-be-able-to-sign-these-guys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/?p=9583","title":{"rendered":"Are the Nats going to be able to sign these guys?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Draft<\/a>

Draft signing deadline day is 7\/18\/14. Photo via chicagonow.com<\/p><\/div>\n

I smell whiffs from 2008’s\u00a0Aaron Crow<\/strong> debacle.<\/p>\n

(Which, just to head off hindsight is 20\/20 arguments, did result in a comp pick that turned into\u00a0Drew Storen<\/strong> … but Storen was a huge overdraft at the 10th overall pick in 2009, a college reliever who was a quick sign. \u00a0The Nats left a lot on the table in the Crow non-signing, as discussed in this space<\/a> recently).<\/p>\n

Right now, as of the morning of the 2014 Rule 4 signing deadline day, there exists just a small handful of players from the first 10 rounds of the draft who have not signed. \u00a0According to MLB.com’s great draft bonus tracker<\/a>, just NINE players out of the first 315 players drafted remain unsigned as of the moment of this posting.<\/p>\n

Three of them are Washington Nationals draft picks. \u00a0And they include the two most important picks of the draft; i.e. our first two picks\u00a0Erick Fedde<\/strong> and\u00a0Andrew Suarez<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What is going on?? \u00a0 We havn’t seen these kinds of difficulties in signing guys since before the slot bonus system went into place. \u00a0What is\u00a0Mike Rizzo<\/strong> doing?<\/p>\n

According to reports<\/a>\u00a0(this\u00a0Bill Ladson<\/strong> report quoting\u00a0Jim Callis<\/strong> and\u00a0Adam Kilgore<\/strong>),\u00a0Fedde got a “$3M offer” from another team he he dropped to them in the 2nd round and (with notoriously difficult negotiator agent\u00a0Scott Boras<\/strong> in charge) is holding out for more than the assigned slot bonus to his pick ($2,145,600). \u00a0 The Nats can go a bit above the $2.1M figure without incurring penalties … but it depends on what happens with their other two marquee picks. \u00a0Media pundits (unnamed of course) are predicting a stalemate here.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the general sense from reading the tea leaves is that Suarez will sign at or near slot (which makes you wonder what the heck is taking so long?), while unsigned 8th rounder\u00a0Austin Byler<\/strong>\u00a0seems to be unsignable at his slot figure ($145k) and will be returning to school. \u00a0Byler’s non-signing isn’t too much of a surprise; he was a 3rd round projected guy who slipped to the 8th round, and the Nats didn’t really free up that much cash in its other first-10-rounds of picks in order to get Byler the $600k it likely would have needed to sign him.<\/p>\n

Aside: speaking of lack of signing bonus money for Byler; is overpaying its college senior signs? \u00a0They drafted\u00a0four college seniors<\/a>\u00a0in the first 10 rounds (Carey, Gardner, Van Orden and Page) and gave them combined more than $200k. \u00a0Could that 200k have been better allocated? \u00a0Did those seniors need to be offered that much money?<\/p>\n

It makes zero sense to me for Fedde not to sign frankly, even if he’s offered less money; by the time he rehabs his TJ surgery, it’ll be nearly the end of next year’s college season. \u00a0There’s just little chance of him going higher than he did this year, nor getting as much bonus money offered. \u00a0And if he has the slightest setback in his recovery, he’ll be lucky to be drafted in the first 5 rounds next year and will be looking at a tenth of the signing bonus offers. \u00a0And, if he doesn’t sign, he’s rehabbing under the care of his personal physician instead of an experienced professional major league team that has rehabbed probably a dozen TJ surgeries in the last few years, including some pretty significant and nationally renound names. \u00a0Why this is taking so long is just beyond me.<\/p>\n

If the Nats fail to sign all three guys, they’ll have compensation picks in the form of the 19th overall pick in the 2015 draft for Fedde and the 58th pick for Suarez (if i’m reading the rules correctly that is; you’re supposed to get compensation for unsigned first, second and any supplemental round picks at your unsigned slot +1 in the following draft, irrespective of how many comp picks get stuffed inbetween rounds the next year). \u00a0I guess that’d make 2015’s draft pretty good. \u00a0But they’ll lose the Byler pick altogether.<\/p>\n

Are you worried?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I smell whiffs from 2008’s\u00a0Aaron Crow debacle. (Which, just to head off hindsight is 20\/20 arguments, did result in a comp pick that turned into\u00a0Drew Storen … but Storen was a huge overdraft at the 10th overall pick in 2009, a college reliever who was a quick sign. \u00a0The Nats left a lot on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[417,111,2464,2472,182,52,2425,507,440,129,180],"class_list":["post-9583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-draft","tag-aaron-crow","tag-adam-kilgore","tag-andrew-suarez","tag-austin-byler","tag-bill-ladson","tag-drew-storen","tag-erick-fedde","tag-jim-bowden","tag-jim-callis","tag-mike-rizzo","tag-scott-boras"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9583"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17390,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9583\/revisions\/17390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalsarmrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}