Picking a No. 1 is easier than getting him signed
Tuesday night will be the easy part. No team sits in front of the Nationals at the start of Major League Baseball’s annual First-Year Player Draft. The No. 1 overall pick was their “reward” for finishing with baseball’s worst record last season.
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A few minutes after 6 p.m., the Nats are expected to announce they have selected San Diego State pitcher Stephen Strasburg. A phenom some scouts claim is the best college pitcher in a generation — a player capable of stepping into a big-league rotation right now — will be theirs.
Well, not really. Because picking Strasburg is one thing. It is actually signing the 6-foot-4 right-hander to a contract that could cause heartburn all summer at Nationals Park.
“That’s always part of the thought process, turning right from selecting the players to signing the players. There’s no exception this year,” said Nats acting general manager Mike Rizzo. “We thought about a whole list of players and how we’re going to sign them, what the budget is going to be. That’s been in our mind for a long time.”
The story lines are juicy. Strasburg is exactly what the Nats need — a pitcher with top-of-the-rotation talent who could lead a young staff into the next decade. But he also is represented by agent Scott Boras, a fierce negotiator unafraid to walk away from the table if he feels his client is not getting fair market value.
Add in that the Nats are again awful, sporting the worst record in baseball by a healthy margin, and that they failed to sign last year’s first-round pick — pitcher Aaron Crow — and you have a soap opera that could play out until the Aug. 15th signing deadline.
Strasburg’s options are few as an amateur. Like most college players, he entered the draft after his junior year and Boras — for now — is simply an “advisor.” So he maintains his NCAA eligibility and can always return to San Diego State.
But in the past Boras has steered clients to independent ball, instead. Crow, the No. 9 pick last June, isn’t a Boras client. But that is the route he took last summer when negotiations with the Nats turned ugly. Crow is now expected to go as high as No. 3 overall after a stint late last summer and again this spring with the Fort Worth Cats, an unaffiliated pro team outside Major League Baseball’s minor-league system.
