2024 Draft - Part 10 - Draft-Eligible Sophomores - No Bargains There

Leverage is a VERY important part of any negotiation.  

In the baseball draft leverage can be with the team or with the player. 

The team usually gets leverage in 3 ways:

• A college junior will lose leverage if they don't sign because college seniors have zero leverage (i.e., they can't go back to college again) and often settle for bonuses in the $1,000 - $100,000 range.  As most bonuses for college juniors, especially in the now-truncated 20 round draft, are above $125,000, you can see where the leverage comes from.
• With high school players, team leverage usually comes from the player wanting to cash in on their success in high school.   And some kids simply don't really want to go to college and are more than willing to sign for that $125,000.  
• For all draft-eligible players, they may simply feel that the risk of future injury or underperformance may hurt their draftability, and their eventual bonus, so they are willing to take the bird in the hand now rather than trust that they can get more in 3 years after their HS junior year.

Leverage for players usually comes from 2 places:

• HS kids who have good college scholarship offers to colleges that develop pro ballplayers.  With the name/image/license money that is now available (not so much with baseball compared to football, though) this makes it more difficult to sign HS players unless they get a great bonus.
• For college kids, it is being a draft eligible sophomore.  There are 2 types of draft eligible sophomores:
• Players who have redshirted either their SCHOLASTIC freshman or sophomore years and are now, scholastically, a college junior.
• Players who were 19 years old when they graduated high school and will turn 21 by August 1st of their draft year.  These players truly have been in college only 2 years, scholastically, but their age when they started college and their birthdate gives them the ability to be drafted as true sophomores.

It's this last group, draft-eligible sophomores, that will be the subject of this post. Those players have A LOT of leverage and so could really eat up our budget.  As mentioned previously, Alex Mooney likely ate up a lot of our draft budget, including overages that were penalized 100%, and money likely earmarked for one or both of our two unsigned HS pitchers, Marohn and Heuer.  

So let's take a look at the best of these 2 types of draft eligible sophomores.  I have included their current MLB Pipeline ranking with the proviso that this ranking is now 3 months old.

4. Charlie Condon - OF -Georgia Condon - Scholastic Jr - Redshirt 

12. Malcolm Moore - C - Stanford - 19 yr old HS graduate, 7/31/2003 birthdate

25. Cam Smith - 3B - Florida St. - 19 yr old HS graduate, 2/20/2003 birthdate

26. Carson Benge - OF/RHP - Oaklahoma St. - Scholastic Jr. - Redshirt

27. Dakota Jordan - OF - Miss. St. - 19 year old HS graduate, 5/9/2003 birthdate

38. Anthony Silva - 3B - TCU - 19 year old HS graduate, 7/17/2003 birthdate

46. Gage Jump, LHP - LSU - Scholastic Jr. - Redshirt

47. Kevn Bazzell C - Texas Tech - Scholastic Jr. - transferred after enrolling in 2022, had to sit out until 2023.

50. Billy Amick 3B - Clemson - Scholastic Jr. -  Redshirt

That's 8 of the top 36 college draft prospects this year, making this year very unusual and allowing it to be dubbed as the year of the draft-eligible sophomore, a group that also includes other studs from the MLB Pipeline top like 64. Austin Overn - OF - USC - 19 year old HS graduate - 5/10/2003 birthdate, among others from MLB Pipeline's top 100 prospects list from Dec. 2023.

NOTE: In thinking about this a little more, maybe a good draft strategy would be to draft the talented sophomores early, i.e., after 1.1.  Teams may hold back as those guys eat up your draft budget due to their leverage.  With our windfall and likely higher-than-usual savings because we own 1.1, maybe we build a war chest to sign a bunch of sophomores early.  Don't know if that will work but I think that this might be a better use of our excess than to sign HS players who have dropped.  From research I had done before the likely gems left after the first few rounds are HS pitchers and I am thinking overpaying for college sophomores is better, in theory, than overpaying for stud HS pitchers who have dropped because their bonus demands might be much greater than their current ability/projections to future ability.