Here are today’s most notable signings from the first few rounds of the draft. Scouting reports and pre-draft rankings can be found courtesy of MLB.com, Fangraphs, Baseball America and ESPN’s Keith Law (the latter two available to subscribers only)…
- The Orioles have agreed to a deal with the 37th overall pick, Oregon State shortstop Cadyn Grenier, Steve Melewski of MASNsports.com tweets. Financial details aren’t yet available, but the 37th choice comes with a slot value of $1,923,500. The 21-year-old Grenier was one of the heroes for an OSU team that just knocked off Arkansas to win the College World Series. Grenier hit an impressive .319/.408/.462 in 273 at-bats this season, though Law was the only one of the abovementioned prospect evaluators to place him in the top 50 entering this year’s draft (No. 46). Law noted then that Grenier could end up as a starting shortstop or a quality utility infielder in the majors.
Earlier updates:
- The Royals have signed 12th-round pick Rylan Kaufman for a hefty $722.5K bonus, MLB.com’s Jeffrey Flanagan reports (Twitter links). Kaufman is an 18-year-old high school left-hander from Texas, and he stands 6’4″ and owns a fastball in the 92-93mph range. Since Kaufman was picked beyond the 10th round, $597.5K of his bonus will be counted against Kansas City’s draft bonus pool. While the Royals entered this year’s draft with the most pool space ($12,781,900) of any team, they already have over $7.6MM of those funds spent (hat tip to Clint Scoles of Baseball Prospectus) and still need to sign their three of their top seven picks. Two of the unsigned players are Kansas City’s top two selections — 18th overall pick Brady Singer and 33rd overall pick Jackson Kowar.
