FRIDAY: Murray will receive $4.66MM, per MLB.com’s Jim Callis (via Twitter), which checks in just below the $4,761,500 slot value. The sides have yet to put pen to paper, Callis notes.
WEDNESDAY: The Athletics have reached a deal with No. 9 overall draft pick Kyler Murray, reports Jon Heyman of FanRag Sports. The agreement will guarantee Murray close to $5MM and allow Murray to play quarterback at Oklahoma for one year, per Heyman. Murray, one of the country’s top multi-sport athletes, could step up as the Sooners’ starting quarterback in place of Baker Mayfield, who was selected with the top overall pick in the 2018 NFL Draft.
Of course, Murray is hardly a slouch when it comes to the baseball diamond. Oakland selected the center fielder ninth overall, and scouting reports on him indicate that he has plus-plus speed in addition to promising bat speed the potential for average or better power, though he’s less polished than many college bats given that he has yet to fully commit to baseball.
Heading into the draft, Fangraphs ranked Murray as the No. 20 prospect in this year’s class, while ESPN’s Keith Law tabbed him 35th, MLB.com pegged him 36th and Baseball America rated him No. 77 among available prospects. Murray, who has yet to turn 21 years of age, is coming off a season in which he hit .296/.398/.556 with 10 homers and 10 steals in 51 games. His slot comes with an assigned pick value of $4,761,500, so it seems that his agreement with the A’s will pay him at that level or perhaps a bit more.
It’s an interesting arrangement for Murray, who’ll lose NCAA eligibility in baseball but (clearly) not in football now that he’s agreed to a deal with a Major League organization. The agreement points to the likelihood that Murray’s future lies on the diamond and not on the gridiron, though it’s sure to be a complex arrangement. It’s not known at this time what sort of contingencies are in place in the event that Murray incurs a severe injury while playing football, though it seems likely that the A’s will have some form of safeguards in place, given the size of their investment in Murray and the level of risk that comes with allowing him to play NCAA football.
This dudes about to win the heisman.
Then a ROY in the NFL and MLB. Then a WS ring, then a SB ring. Lol
Why stop there? He can probably play in the NBA too hell Jordan played baseball… if he can make the majors I assume Murray could do the opposite! lol But in all seriousness… this is a strange deal for the A’s … like obviously the reason he wants to play a season at QB is to be an NFL QB. So drafting and signing him… and letting him play football seems like a massive gamble with the #9 pick. Basically all of their eggs are riding on him sucking as a quarterback… which is kind of an ironic thing to have to root for.
He’s a 5’9″ QB and the NFL is less money and more brain injuries, he’s not going there when MLB has more money and a longer lifespan. He just wants to win a Heisman then peace out.
Or maybe he just loves football also. After all that grind and work he’s put in, maybe he just wants to prove to himself he could be just as good as Mayfield was. The kid put in 3 years of the hell and grind college football entails with his teammates. I don’t think it’s that crazy of a thought that he might want to finish up his football career trying to assist his teammates do what they couldn’t last year.
Jordan never played in the majors, he only played in the minors. If Reinsdorf (Bulls owner) hadn’t owned the White Sox who knows if he would have been given more than a Spring training invite. Murray at least has legitimate talent in 2 sports. Don’t get me wrong, Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, but at age 30 he didn’t have much talent to play baseball.
More than a little evidence that Jordan’s minor-league season was a way for him to avoid an NBA gambling suspension; to save face and not have to be booted from the league he helped create.
lol
Bob Gibson was a heck of a basketball player
and he even played for the Harlem Globetrotters at one time. Plus we all know what kind of a MLB talent he was !
Have you watch the guy play football he’s horrible. I imagine the A’s hope that he is a better baseball player than football.
And much like Charlie Ward, have a productive career in another sport, and never suit up in the NFL. Kyler is tiny.
Imagine getting a $5 million dollar payday and have a year left of college lol
Which I don’t see how that is fair? A college junior gets drafted to the MLB and CAN’T return to school to finish his ACADEMIC career, but little man can ink a $4.7 million deal and then go BACK to school to play football. Not to mention…aren’t the A’s worried that he’ll get injured? Nevermind liking football enough to go pro…that’s a non-starter and ain’t happening. Seems like dude gets the best of both worlds. MLB thought process: “Wanna play another sport? Sure. Go ahead. Want to finish college to get your education? No. Sorry. Hard pass.” Weird.
So what happens if he blows out a knee or something playing football? For that much money, they should have made him choose baseball only.
Apparently you can split the signing bonus for multi-sport athletes. Basically give him a part now, and the majority of it next year when he joins the A’s. If he blows out his knee and can’t play baseball, he wouldn’t get the second part. Otherwise he’d have surgery and rehab it. The A’s said they were comfortable with the risk.
What does it matter if he blows out a knee? He will get surgery and be fine to continue his baseball career in the Oakland organization. Name one position player who lost his career to blown out knee. Pitchers maybe, but no position player is losing a career from a hurt knee anymore. Dustin Fowler is right there, cmon.
The injury you need to be talking about are neck/spine/brain ones, if you want to take this amazing story into that stupid, dark area, but why bother doing that? The guy is an amazing athlete who looks like the best player in the draft.
It was just a simple question, dude.
Dang, who pissed on your Corn Flakes?
you did, when you asked a really stupid what if question
How about your ultra-stupid takes on America’s passion football.
Did you still eat them?
Yes, why do you think I’m so mad! Also, can’t be wasting food….
You mean my ultra-realist takes on the most dying sport in the world that morons can’t fathom might stop existing in our lifetime, when there’s mountains of data to support it, and even though many other football leagues have folded in the last 100 years so its not that crazy to think might happen again? Yeah still got those. All day.
I’ve read the nonsense you post, yet you never back it up. “The most dying sport in the world” congratulations you’ve outdone yourself in the stupidity category. I’m gonna guess you’re over 50 and still have the paper delivered daily, and tend to have those senior moments at restaurants. How do you attend night games when you can’t drive. I love baseball but 80% of the country doesn’t. Can you say regional sport and not national.
Wow, thanks for the ad hominem attack. Baseball is America’s national pastime no matter what ESPN tells you. Football might not exist in its current form in 10 years. My “backing it up” is the scientific evidence that 99% of NFL players have CTE. You need to stop being such a crybaby, your precious NFL is going to be over in our lifetime. Prepare yourself now instead of resisting.
I’m in my 30’s, and don’t read newspapers I’m environmentally friendly and hate seeing paper wasted like that. I don’t drive I take lyft because I live in a major city and can’t deal with parking tickets, lol
“80% of America hates baseball” – quoted for how insane that is lol shut up man
Then your Doctor needs to adjust your lithium dosage. Here’s what’s gonna happen this summer and fall.
LeBron James news will be the #1 trending topic on all media outlets.
The NFL training camp and preseason games will dwarf anything MLB airs. that includes your precious All Star game.
Unless the Red Sox, Dodgers, Cubs, or Yankees make the World Series maybe 10-12 million people will watch each game.
The NFL will have the highest rated programming of the year followed by the NBA.
In your world “America’s Pastime” will continue to slip in being even less a regional but a local sport.
Mike Trout walks down the street in the middle of Manhattan and is not recognized by anyone. The guy was wrong about 80% of the country hating baseball more like 90% think it’s boring and don’t give it any thought.
You being in your 30’s and liking baseball is so very, very rare..good for you
“99% of NFL players have CTE” well you better call the league office from your major city on Venus.
Baseball attendance is up
and the future looks bright! The NFL is gonna implode one day very soon
and if it even survives , be a totally different game than the one we know today!
Baseball is the second most profitable sport dwarfing the NBA by more than 6 billion.
Insurance and deferment of the bonus. Pretty standard stuff.
I’m sure they have a rider written in on his insurance plan to cover just that if it would happen!
Wow and he signed over his slot value?
many scouts didn’t think he would play baseball is why he wasn’t very high on any list. 1 scout said he was a top 3 pick if he only played baseball.
Harold said he would’ve taken him #1 overall. Harold also says a lot of dumb stuff, so take that for what it’s worth.
I love how badly Trout being an instant HOFer destroyed Beane’s entire raison d’etre because Trout is the exact kind of player Beane SHOULD have had the foresight to draft early above projection but he played it safe and went with Grant Green. “We’re not selling jeans” has become “We’re going after the highest ceiling no matter what anyone thinks”.
Amazingly, ever since Trout blew up, Beane has drafted Russell, Chapman and Beck slightly higher than the experts thought and he’s been crushing it so far (although Beck is very far off). Murray might be his crown jewel and a similar style player to Trout, maybe not exactly him but still a very excellent player. He sure does have that power+speed combo in the bag already, plus his bodytype is way more suited to baseball than football. If he gets to MLB quickly as a 23 or 24 year old we are all in for a treat.
back in those days they also picked players on sign ability. Green was a cheap sign because of last year in college. Michel Choice was a even bigger disaster..
I don’t really get what you mean, Green signed for $2.75M, Trout signed for $1.215M.
Trout signed for slot value, Green signed for far below slot value. No way if Trout had been picked where Green was he would have accepted 1.2 million.. Teams missed on Trout because he wasn’t in a ton of the showcases, he’s from a cold-weather state so not as many scouts saw him and some people thought his body was a little on the thick side; that he wasn’t going to show the elite athleticism he has. Teams miss out in the draft every year.
Right, and all those things you said are note-perfect Moneyball-type reasons that Beane should have drafted him. Are you saying Trout wouldn’t have taken the $2.75M (or less) the A’s gave Green even though he signed for $1.2 anyway? Seems obtuse. He probably would have signed for whatever the A’s wanted to give him.
But hey, if missing out on Trout means you end up with more Matt Chapmans, Addison Russells, Kyler Murrays and less Grant Green’s, the A’s will be way better for it.
No, I’m saying basically no team in baseball was on Trout. He was drafted as low as he was for not a single reason related to money. Nobody saw him; literally, only a handful of scouts saw him. There is absolutely no way to predict that any draft pick might become the best player of all time. Trout is going to become that, probably. Without injury, certainly. That’s no failure in scouting for any of the 22 teams who passed him up: that’s just luck.
That’s very wrong, because he still went in the 1st round, if “no one saw him” then he wouldn’t have gone 25th overall. People knew who he was but my point remains that this “rarely-seen” guy is the guy Beane should have Beaned on. He didn’t, he went safer with Green. Ever since Beane has constantly going after these higher ceiling higher risk guys, is more in-line with his mentality, and certainly more interesting that they are panning out more than his safe picks.
Hindsight is 20/20. Nobody was really on Trout at the top of the first round.
UCLA is going to knock him out for the year in week 2.
The 2019 baseball year? A’s fans probably don’t care about the football season and would probably prefer it if he got hurt in a way that wouldn’t effect his long term baseball future, tbh. Don’t need concussions, A’s fans should be rooting for an easily-fixed injury that only takes him out for the college football season, with due respect to the man himself.
Or you know, no injury at all.
Kinda like how baker mayfield and 1000s of others got thru the season.
Well thats what we all SHOULD be assuming, but from the second he was drafted suddenly the extremely dumb “duhhh what if he gets hurt” narrative appeared and here we are at the bottom.
Stay classy Bart
What is the point playing football anyway?
Yeah I don’t understand this. Its a real risky move for Oakland allowing him to play football this year.
The risks were there when they made the pick. He was pretty forward about his own intentions. The A’s are shooting for upside. Plenty of draftees get hurt playing baseball early on, so how much more of a risk are they taking? Hard to say.
Fantastic take.
Hell it’s less of a risk than signing a high school pitcher in the 1st round.
That talented to take a gamble on the athlete? Time will tell…
Lol Ranked as high as #20 by Fangraphs, 35-36 by Keith Law and MLB.com, then you have Baseball America… #77 Lol
Just shows you how much of a crapshoot the MLB Draft is, when you have this much variance, in the prospect rankings.
If you’re a longtime Jays fan, you never believe Keith Law.
This has to be the quickest the A’s have signed a first round pick. It seems that him being able to play this fall was part of the equation before they drafted him. We let you play, we pay you extra, you sign and switch cleats after the championship.
especially quick considering he’s “advised” by Boras
How screwed up is the NCAA system if they allow him to play football? Wasnt there an Olympic skier in the late 90’s or early 2000’s who won a couple medals and was then ruled ineligible to play wideout at Colorado for doing a couple of ads, yet this kid can sign a professional contract for millions of dollars?
It’s a different sport! He can play football , but not baseball in college !
Will he play affiliated ball in the spring and take classes on the side like Marcus Stroman?
Murray is a smart kid, he looks beyond the horizon and sees that the NFL is on its “last legs” as a professional organization. The future is in baseball – good for him.
what planet do you live on, cause it’s certainly not earth. By the by the future is the NBA and a little thing called Soccer. MLB is #3 and dying as fast as it’s main fan core, the baby-boomers..average age of an MLB fan 55..look it up. Omfg
And honestly, the NBA needs a salary cap, so the same teams don’t just win every year.
the NBA has a salary cap
This was a joke
Can’t believe this guy is getting so many Downvotes when he’s mainly right. Yet the first guy gets upvotes for an incorrect post. Yet of course only David responded to him.
Mlb is number 2 on most profitable sports dummy. Dwarfs champions league and the NBA by 7 and 6 billion respectively
MLb will be fine; yes, older people prefer it – older people also have more money. The death of baseball has long been presumed. Those people have always been wrong.
The NFL will have some issues in the coming years as the CTE and concussion stuff becomes more widely-known. Soccer is doing great right now but it’s an absolute niche sport – I would guess 99.9% of the people who look at this website couldn’t name a single American soccer player before they could name a British, Spanish or South American one.
As far as Murray; yeah, he knows he’s not going to be an NFL player. He’s 5’9″ quarterback and I don’t think anyone with that profile has ever been successful. He wants to try to win a championship and stay with his buddies another year. The A’s knew what they were getting into when they drafted him.
“Soccer is doing great right now but it’s an absolute niche sport” the sport that thrives already in the NW, SW, and is gaining in the NE. Why do people on here try to grasp at CTE being the demise of the NFL? America is a country that prefers violence and action in their sports. The people who look at this website aren’t even close to being an example of the majority sports fan in the US today. Go take a look at an article on NFL traderumors and you’ll see it will average a minimum of 300 hundred posts, same with the NBA trade rumors. By the way take a poll of the Hispanic and Eastern European communities about those players and you’ll get those answers. Oh by the way the NBA most certainly has salary cap.
Yes, the NBA salary cap thing was a joke. And we have a President who is deporting “Hispanic” people ate a record pace.
Baby boomers can’t buy tickets and merchandise from the grave, enjoy the dimming of the light. It’s not deporting when they’re not citizens. Oh maybe check your facts on “a record pace”.
Your buddy Donald Trump is separating kids and families, many of whom are here fleeing dictators or extreme violence. And your buddy Trump is separating kids and families and putting both in prisons. Not a great environment to scout players from latin countries.
Your buddy Obama sent illegals back far more and separated more families, which of course created the illegal dreamers act. It’s the chance you take by entering illegally, oh and there’s extreme violence here..see Chicago and so on. Try entering that way in Australia you’re bound to end up a castaway on an island. Oh Trump is definitely not my buddy, but if you think someone like your hero Bernie is on the up-and-up, just keep living the dream…
Okay. We are both assuming things that are wrong; but if you don’ think Mr. Trump’s actions with the wall and separating families and imprisoning children isn’t going to have an impact on the climate between the U.S. and Latin/South America, you’re probably wrong.
No ones imprisoning children. He’s literally following the law. Would you let kids into prisons because they’re being separated from their families?
Soccer is a niche sport? Soccer is the No.#1 sport in the World! LoL
This was a terrible pick Considering it was at #9…this kid wasn’t even considered a top thirty prospect if he decided he wasn’t going to play football. Knowing he planned on playing, a lot of teams just crossed him off the board.
Dead wrong, many had him as the #1 pick if he had been more open to quitting football entirely.
Nobody did. Another A’s apologist.
There were rumors going into the draft that he’d be willing to commit to baseball if he were allowed to play at OU for the 2018 football season. Rumors that were later confirmed. The fact that we drafted him at all over Liberatore and Singer kind of confirm that.
Harold Reynolds said it.
I definitely thought they were going take Swaggerty too, as well as Liberatore and Singer.