MVN - Most Valuable Network

Tiger Draft Signing (Old) News

Well, today was supposed to be the big day for the draft signings. The Tigers had a number of early round picks who hadn’t signed, who everyone knew would require way more than their recommended bonuses to sign, and who would have a huge impact on whether this year’s draft was an accomplishment or a disappointment. And today, the deadline for players to sign, was supposed to be the day when we found out who was and wasn’t signing.

Well, the Tigers - unlike just about every other team in baseball - jumped the gun and released details on the signings of not only the big “get”, Rick Porcello (1st round, $7.3 million major league contract), but also Casey Crosby (5th round, $745,000), Cale Iorg (6th round, $1.5 million) and even Matt Hoffman (26th round, $175,000).

So today, there aren’t a whole lot of questions as to who may or may not sign. Dominic De la Osa, an outfielder out of Vanderbilt, is the only player taken in the first ten rounds who hasn’t signed. And from what I’ve read, his situation doesn’t seem to have moved a whole lot from when I first speculated he might stick around at Vandy to try to boost his stock next year. Almost everything I’ve seen in the last few days has him returning to college.

So instead of talking about the players the Tigers might be getting like I had planned, I am just linking to articles and giving a few thoughts on their being brought into the fold.

Casey Crosby

This first link is an article written by Crosby’s mom, Denise, who is the managing editor at the Beacon News. I found it at Mlive.com’s Cutoff Man blog. This second link talks about the money he got and some interesting details, like how Crosby will go to Florida to work out with the GCL team, but doesn’t expect to really pitch until the instructional league starts in mid-September.

Crosby is obviously a talent, but the experts I read seem to vary a bit on how much of a talent he is. Carlos Gomez of Hardball Times is on record as saying, “meh”, and at Baseball Prospectus, Bryan Smith is lukewarm on him while Kevin Goldstein seemed to like him quite a bit. I don’t know who’s right, but I know Crosby is a 6′5″ lefty out of high school who throws in the low 90s. That’s somebody whose progress I’m excited to track for the next few years.

Rick Porcello

There’s a story on Porcello on just about every site that covers baseball, and I’ve already talked about him quite a bit so I’ll just provide links to stories from three mainstream Tiger sites: the News, the Free Press and the Tigers’ site.

Cale Iorg

Everything I found on Iorg just talks about him being one of the above slot signings rather than focusing on Iorg himself. There was this story, but even it is from Arizona and focuses more on how the Sun Devils are losing a shortstop rather than the player the Tigers are getting.

However, with the cheese the Tigers are throwing his way, there has to be something there they like. iIt must have stuck in their minds, too, because when he was drafted nobody had seen him play in more than two years. He had been on a Mormon mission in Portugal.

Matt Hoffman

Here’s a story about Hoffman, who probably would have gone higher than the 26th round, but he was considered strongly committed to Oklahoma. I may have mentioned this before, but he’s from the same town and high school as Dallas Trahern, who I think the Tigers also stole from Oklahoma as a late round pick.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under Prospects, Draft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.