SluggerDad posted:I was just wondering how common this sort of thing is.
There's not a large sample to draw from.
The MLB teams are very good at figuring out which top high school profits they can sign, so there are very few high school players taken in the signing rounds who do not sign.
Last year, there were only four high school players drafted in the top ten rounds who didn't sign, so with numbers these small, it's hard to make generalizations.
In the case you're interested in, the player was ranked extremely high (single digits by PG), and very early mock drafts projected him as high as the middle of the first round. So it's easy to see how he may have developed expectations of a bonus 5 or 10 times higher than the slot value of where he was actually picked. A team took a chance on nabbing a top talent at a bargain price, but they didn't close the deal.
Fast forward to 2016. The player went to JUCO and had a solid but not eye-popping freshman year that wasn't enough to push him back to the top few rounds.
So where would you draft him? He already proved he won't sign for 7th round money, so nobody wants to risk cutting their bonus pool by drafting him in the top ten rounds. And once you're in the 11th round, the round doesn't matter as far as the bonus they can offer.
It goes back to what PGStaff said in another thread about how the CBA introduces too many distorting factors that keep teams from drafting players in the order of their perceived talent.