(1) On the Barnsby zoom call after day 2 he and Paul Hoynes talked about a new rule in effect. For those of you who remember the draft used to have a rule where a team could draft a player going to or returning to junior college the next year. They would retain his signing rights until right before the draft the next year. This rule was called the draft-and-follow rule and teams like the Guardians employed it extensively when they had to find 40 or more guys to draft in what was an expanded draft at the time.
Barnsby said, on prompting from Hoynes, that there was a new rule this year where if a guy currently at a junior college after his freshman season decided to return to junior college for his sophomore season that the drafting team retained his rights until the next year and that they could sign him for up to $225,000. Don't know any more about that rule than that but the one JUCO kid they drafted (Ellerts) would not be eligible as he completed his sophomore year in JUCO and would have had to move on to a 4-year school.
(2) The good people over and Cleveland Guardians Prospective tweeted out that we apparently have a $1.2 million deal in place with our 10th round pick Zibin. In these cases the deal isn't formalized until the funds are available once the other bonuses in the top 10 rounds have been agreed to and contracts have been signed. If you did it any other way, especially for a 10th round pick like Zibin, you would be really screwed if you couldn't sign all of your earlier picks because each pick you don't sign in the top 10 rounds causes you to lose that slot amount from your bonus pool. The only way to come up with the $1 million overslot money for Zibin is to give some or all the draftees in rounds 1-9 underslot money. That is why these handshake deals, if done, are kept on the down low so that it doesn't poison negotiations with other draftees. In fact, I have heard, though don't have any substantiating evidence, that a-wink-and-a-nod deals like this have been killed if they were leaked like this one has been.
Just sayin', if the kid or his family or friends leaked this information that kid will likely be heading to college this fall. He may be headng there anyway now if there is any truth to this rumor, no matter who spread it. If a scout told this kid that this was a done deal when it really wasn't, then that is bad for and on the scout.
While I would love to get Zibin and Humphries signed, I just don't see this year where we have the money. Normally, as in the case of Kumar Rocker and some of the other head scratchers from the first round this year, pre-draft deals are cut for up to half of the slot value of that bonus. That gives the drafting team serious coin to spend on overslot deals with later draft picks. Looking at our draft there are not of lot of headscrathers and guys were drafted around their prospect ranking, telling me there won't be a lot of excess bonus money, at least not in the first 3 rounds where bonuses are high.
Even if we shaved off 10% of the bonuses for every guy in the first 9 rounds that would barely get it done. And when you consider that the first three guys we drafted were drafted almost EXACTLY in the slots corresponding to their ranking, the 4th guy was slightly higher than their ranking, the next two were both draft eligble college sophomores (who still can be drafted two more times) folled by one college junior, one college senior (bonus slot $161,000) and 3 high school kids, I just don't see how all of them fit into the first 10 rounds if we give Zibin a bonus $1 million over his slot.
Hey, the Guardians are great at figuring this stuff out, so much so that I have seen them pull rabbits out of their hats every year since the slot values and penalties came into being, but, even with their magic, I don't see how this one will work out. Time will tell but my guess is that someone stuck their foot, or cyberfoot, in their mouth on this one.
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