Two more undrafted free agents signed on Tuesday

As the baseball world goes up in flames before our very eyes — or, I suppose more accurately, the Major League Baseball world — the Red Sox are still staying busy adding to their major-league roster. We are still in this unprecedented undrafted free agent signing period after the joke of a five-round draft that was just held in which it is a total free-for-all for any talent who is not going back to school. There’s no financial muscle to be flexed here, either, with each team only being able to offer the same $20,000 signing bonus. The Red Sox have been successful in this period at least in terms of quantity early on, signing six players on Sunday, the first day signing opened, and then adding four more on Monday. They kept on the same pattern Tuesday, dropping down to two new signees. As always, Baseball America remains a big help with their league-wide signing tracker.

Cuba Bess, 1B, Grand Canyon University

According to the player himself — you can be the judge on how reliable this information is — Bess was the first player contacted by the Red Sox when teams were allowed to call players. The first baseman was picked by his hometown Rockies in the 39th round of the 2016 draft but opted to play at Grand Canyon. He got off to a bit of a slow start in his career, struggling with consistency in his freshman year before going down with a major knee injury (it’s just referred to in the linked post above as torn ligaments) his sophomore year, which turned into a redshirt year. He recovered nicely, though, coming back in 2019 with a .341/.476/.632 line, then going to play in the Northwoods Collegiate league that summer and putting up solid numbers there as well. He suffered another injury in 2020, though not a serious one just a hamstring tweak, but just as he was getting back going — he had a 1.028 OPS in 12 plate appearances — the season was cancelled. The article linked at the top of this paragraph also mentions that his father was drafted by the Reds and played seven professional seasons before hanging it up.

Maceo Campbell, RHP, Longwood University

There’s not a whole lot of information out there on Campbell, but we do have a little bit. The righty was named by Perfect Game as the number one prospect coming out of Washington D.C. in his high school graduation year back in 2017, and he was a top 500 high school prospect overall as well. He went undrafted, however, and opted to play at Longwood. The numbers have not been all that great in two seasons there, however, with a 6.75 ERA over 22 ²⁄₃ innings with 27 strikeouts and 32 walks. Campbell didn’t play in 2019, either, though the team website just says he was redshirted so it’s unclear if that was a health decision or just a normal redshirt. Presumably there is something the Red Sox saw in the scouting that they liked that lifted him above the numbers seen here, but there aren’t any public reports, beyond this placement on a list of players who topped 95 mph with their fastball in the summer of 2019, as far as I can tell.