[DC 86]

I remember seeing Bailey's college stats and thinking in my John McEnroe inner voice "You cannot be serious. This guy can't hit, shouldn't be a first round pick, and we already have Joey Bart." I realize they took Bailey because he was more like a 3rd/4th pick, who agreed to sign for much less money.

That's a great story, except that the slot value for the pick was $4.197 million and Bailey signed for $3.8 million, less than a 10% discount. Third and fourth round slot values ranged from 431k to 857k that year.

He may or may not turn out to be a valuable MLB player, but the offensive bar for catchers is incredibly low at the moment, and he did win the minor league gold glove at the position last year (there's one gold glove awarded for each position across all of minor league baseball, meaning all levels).

Regarding his college statistics: he hit 302/411/568 for his career while playing in the ACC, 296/466/685 his junior (i.e. final) year, almost as many walks as strikeouts overall. You can question his batting average, except for the fact that no team puts weight on batting average, in fact statistics themselves are only a small part of the evaluation. Still, a well above average defensive catcher with a .466 OBP in a major conference doesn't equate to a third or fourth round grade, which is why he was paid almost $4 million.

[DC 86]

I remember seeing Bailey's college stats and thinking in my John McEnroe inner voice "You cannot be serious. This guy can't hit, shouldn't be a first round pick, and we already have Joey Bart." I realize they took Bailey because he was more like a 3rd/4th pick, who agreed to sign for much less money.

That's a great story, except that the slot value for the pick was $4.197 million and Bailey signed for $3.8 million, less than a 10% discount. Third and fourth round slot values ranged from 431k to 857k that year.

He may or may not turn out to be a valuable MLB player, but the offensive bar for catchers is incredibly low at the moment, and he did win the minor league gold glove at the position last year (there's one gold glove awarded for each position across all of minor league baseball, meaning all levels).

Regarding his college statistics: he hit 302/411/568 for his career while playing in the ACC, 296/466/685 his junior (i.e. final) year, almost as many walks as strikeouts overall. You can question his batting average, except for the fact that no team puts weight on batting average, in fact statistics themselves are only a small part of the evaluation. Still, a well above average defensive catcher with a .466 OBP in a major conference doesn't equate to a third or fourth round grade, which is why he was paid almost $4 million.