2021 Draft Signing Period

Hat tip to @ethanhullihen on 7/22/21:
"Contingent payments. A first-year player may be offered a specified sum of no more than $2,500 contingent upon the player's being retained by the signing Major or Minor League Club for a period that may not exceed 90 days of one Minor League playing season. If a player whose contract contains such a contingent bonus provision is selected under Rule 5 (annual Selection of Players) before the date the bonus becomes payable, the bonus shall become due immediately and shall be paid by the Club from which the contract was selected."

Leiter signs for $7.9M. Pending Fabian, still much happier with Mayer and how other areas worked out. Guess we'll see!

I don't have an issue gambling when the pick is protected. I have a massive issue if those reports are right and best case was you sign one of your 2nd and 5th round picks. Last report showed only 13 unsigned guys picked in the first ten rounds among all teams. Five of them belong to just two teams in Texas and Boston.

Steering the conversation a different direction, do you think that Leiter (if the Sox really were his preferred destination) would've commanded nearly $8 mil from Boston too? Because given the million dollar difference in draft slots for the picks that would've pretty much tanked the rest of our draft bonus pool which makes the Mayer pick better to me for that reason alone, let alone the fact that I like Mayer more in a vacuum.

I hope the Sox are able to sign Fabian, but if they don't they don't. The Sox will recoup the pick next season if they have to.

Whether he signs or not he's an intriguing prospect with strikeout issues that may hamper his career.

I can understand his unhappiness at losing out on the guaranteed 3 million the Orioles had pocketed for him, and I can understand his unhappiness that the Sox will go nowhere near that figure, whether it's between 2 or 2.5 million.

The reality is that the $3 million isn't happening and that even 2.4 million would be a helluva windfall for a young kid. That's 40 years of averaging $60K, which is a lifetime of earnings for a lot of people and he'd have whatever he earns on top of it regardless if baseball fails plus his interest compounding daily. Wish I had 2.4 million in my 401k with 40 years of growth to accumulate.

So in reality 2.4 million is nothing to sneeze at, at all. Let's just say my heart won't bleed for him if he turns it down, and if he winds up with lesser after next season.

Some of these guys have big egos. You're the best in your class, among the best in your country. Sometimes that can make a person think, 2.4 million? That's nothing. I have zero doubt I'll be better next season and triple that figure.

And if he feels that, it's his choice. It means that he didn't want to wager on himself to rocket up the minor league and make the even bigger dollars as CF of the Red Sox. He'd rather bet on himself at the college level after one season and make it up front.

At this point, I really have no idea if he's going to sign or not. I can imagine a lot of this is agency driven, but in a few days the kid is going to have to make a potentially life altering decision. Hope it's to take the guaranteed money up front, join the Red Sox organization, kick butt in the minors, and make a mega-fortune as Sox CF.

If that's how he feels, that's fine - his decision. I don't think he's a generational talent, so I'm ok with the Sox drawing a line in the sand and moving on to next year's draft with the 41st pick if need be.

I think they would've drafted completely differently. Green's father on Twitter suggested he thought the Red Sox would've taken Payton in the second if Mayer hadn't fallen to them. I'm not sure about that (although doubling up on HS SS's with 4 and 40 would've been a bit weird), but drafting Green in the 2nd if they got Leiter at 4 does make a lot of sense, right? Maybe you get him for a little under slot. But at that point we're in butterfly-flapping-its-wings chaos theory.

Not really. Again, they did the same thing with Groome and with Denney, and I don't see how Leiter is different. Jim on our podcast and on his own used the term "prisoner of his own talent" for Leiter in that teams were going to just pick him if they wanted him, whatever he was saying about a deal later in the draft or not. We don't know what Leiter was saying - maybe he said he had a deal for $8.5M and $7.9M is settling, right?

The point is that the way the draft is set up, players don't get to dictate where they go. And like I said, if they are actually low-balling him, that is one thing. If they're offering him a first-round bonus, no I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

Yeah I just don't see the Leiter situation as an applicable parallel unless he truly had a deal for >$7.9M lined up. Anything else is just posturing and clearly we weren't going to pay him $8M. I'd wager the Rangers knew that.

We can agree to disagree...but I would disagree with your point that "the way the draft is set up, players don't get to dictate where they go." This draft structure with bonus pools and flexibility to allocate $ within the bonus pools as you wish creates a structure in which there are more considerations at each pick other than best player available considerations. Its the reason why a player ranked #21 in Bubba Chandler falls to pick #72 and ends up signing for $3M. That doesn't happen with the draft structure of the NBA, NFL, or NHL. So to a degree, the player and the agent (assuming leverage) can line up the best $ deal available and often get to that deal and in our case, we prevented that from happening for Fabian. Its obviously allowable within the rules of the draft, no disagreement there, but I also understand why there is at least some hesitation on the part of Fabian and his agent. Thats all I'm trying to say.

Literally to inform the agent of what his signing demands should be in an attempt to get that player to fall to your pick.

In 2020, there were 7 college hitters drafted before him (Cowser, Frelick, McLain, Sweeney, Black, Nelson, Zavala). For 2021, someone with his exact same profile would probably go lower. Brooks Lee, Jace Jung, Kevin Parada, Gavin Cross, Jacob Berry, Robert Moore, Daniel Susac, and Carter Young all look significantly more attractive now than Jud Fabian and the names picked before him. Carter Young already presents a more attractive version of Fabian's archetype to some degree. Obviously more people could (and probably will!) move up and some more names will move down, but without a dramatic improvement, Fabian's relative place in the class probably gets worse. My initial take on things is that I don't think there will be a huge shift in the HS/College balance this upcoming year, but within college performers, the skew is more towards hitting this upcoming draft.

edit: Thinking about it further, there's a number of guys I would just generally think could go higher but am less certain about. Chase DeLauter (putting on a show on the Cape!), Dylan Beavers, Hayden Dunhurst, and Jared McKenzie for instance.

They wouldn't do that unless they wanted their word to be worthless. Even Hobbes and Machiavelli knew the importance of reputation for wielding political power...

That's a really good point about the bonus pools, but I quibble a little. For example, Bubba Chandler didn't necessarily fall because he had a deal with the Pirates (at least that I know of, but if he did pick a different guy). He fell because teams weren't willing to meet a price they thought he'd sign for (which, I would not, is not the same, necessarily, as the price he told teams he would sign for) for whatever reason, be it that they didn't think he was worth it, didn't want to try to fit that bonus under the cap, etc.

If a team is willing to wind up not signing the player, I have no problem with them popping him whether or not he says he's got a deal with another team later in the draft, provided they make the player a realistically fair offer. Like I said, if the Red Sox are offering $2M, yeah that's a bit iffy. But if they offer first-round money, I have don't have an issue with it. Remember, it's called a contract negotiation not a contract execution of a formality.

And for what it's worth, the pool thing is just as much a bug as a feature - it absolutely bones college seniors who get drafted and have an offer of a $10k signing bonus or indy ball. That part is asinine in the context of what minor league baseball players get paid.