With their first pick in the second round, the Pirates drafted Josh Bell, a switch-hitting high school outfielder that Baseball America had as one of their 15 best prospects in this draft. Bell was available with the 61st pick because he more or less told teams that he wasn’t going to sign and he was going to honor his commitment to the University of Texas.
Keith Law says that the Pirates will need more than Stetson Allie money to convince Bell to sign (Allie’s $2.25 million bonus last year is the Pirates’ biggest non-first round bonus to date) and Kevin Goldstein says that the realistic chances of him signing as of today are less than 30%. Obviously, that’s not good. Some guys, like Gerrit Cole in 2008, just don’t want to sign and think they can improve their stock in college.
That said, the guy hired Scott Boras as an advisor. Why hire Boras if you’re 100% uninterested in signing? I would think that’s a sign that he’ll at least listen to what the Pirates have to offer. I also think it’s important to consider something that I was thinking last night (not in relation to Bell, obviously, but in terms of the big picture of this draft) and that came up in Bucs Dugout’s draft discussion thread: that there’s a really good chance that Cole will sign a big league deal, which will allow his money to be spread out over several years and that may leave more money for Bell in the Pirates’ budget for 2011.
Bell is far from a sure thing to sign, obviously, and I think the degree of difficulty here is probably much higher than it was with Allie last year. But don’t count the Pirates out of this one yet; Huntington and company have proven that they’re serious about signing the players that they draft, even when observers don’t expect them to.
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