The Royals' first four draft picks remain unsigned, and at least the first three figure to receive bonuses well above baseball's silly "recommendations."
Aaron Crow will be the richest of the draft picks, and as soon as he was selected 12th overall, there were people in Kansas City crushing the guy for turning down $3.5 million the year before. Something must be wrong with him, they say. What kind of kid turns down that money?
If that's your viewpoint, fair enough, it's legitimate. That's a ton of money for anybody, let alone a college kid getting paid to play baseball.
Then there's another viewpoint, one that says baseball is a multi-billion dollar industry flush with cash, and it's only fair that the players driving interest get their share.
Tim Kurkjian recently told the story of Pirates pitcher Ross Ohlendorf, perhaps the game's smartest player -- he majored in Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton -- and his relevant senior thesis.
Ohlendorf looked at the top 100 picks from 1989 to 1993, tracking the progress of each player to determine the financial value of the picks. There is some estimation that cannot be avoided here, but Ohlendorf's thesis -- he got an A on it, by the way -- found that on average, those draft picks brought twice the return.
So if this is your viewpoint, then, yeah, maybe the teams should pay closer to what these guys are worth.
And here's one more viewpoint, one that I find myself leaning more and more to. What if this ends up being the biggest moment of these players' lives? What if they never make it in the majors? What if they get hurt? What if they just don't develop, the way a lot of draft picks just don't develop?
Baseball's draft is the closest thing to a guessing game of any major sports. More can't-miss prospects miss in baseball than any other sport. There's a good chance that for at least one of the Royals' highest draft picks, their financial value will never be higher. Why shouldn't they try to maximize it?
Anyway, here's what I did. I looked at the first-round draft picks from 2000, 2001 and 2002, and compared the money they signed for initially to the money they've made in the seven to nine years since.
Of the 84 players I looked at*, 62 of them have yet to earn as much playing professional baseball as they did the day they signed. Some of them, like Casey Kotchman and B.J. Upton and Matt Cain, soon will earn enough that those signing bonuses will become tip money.
* A small number got thrown out of the study, usually because they didn't sign as first-round picks.
Others, like Dewan Brazelton and Luis Montanez and Royce Ring, may be living the rest of their lives on that first payday.
For whatever reason, we often look at the draft picks as the bad guys in these negotiations, the greedy and unproven ones out to drain teams for every last cent.
But the teams don't have to pay it, and there's no doubt this money means a lot more to a kid who may be setting his family up for life than it does an insanely wealthy team owner.
So long as the financials keep working out that this is smart investing for teams, and so long as the system is set up for draft picks to negotiate free of predetermined salary figures, more power to them if they want to make their first payday count.
If it's against the rules to skip the first three rounds, then the Royals should draft the most expenisve players available without any intention of signing them. There's no way the Royals can afford to pay a player $50 million to sign. The entire franchise sold for $92 million in 2000...and even this amount was quite a bit more than the next highest bidder, but David Glass thought it was a fair price and was being generous. The Royals can't leave KC, so the franchise value is probably zero right now because no one who might want to purchase them would want to keep them in KC.