Red Sox sign Nick Yorke

The Red Sox have been a bit more slow-moving with signing their draft picks from last month compared to some other teams, many of whom have already signed multiple players and some of whom have invited said players to summer camp. Coming into Tuesday, the Red Sox had only signed third rounder Blaze Jordan, who received an overslot $1.75 million signing bonus. On Tuesday, they made officially welcomed their top pick into the organization with high school infielder Nick Yorke signing on this morning. The deal will be an underslot deal worth $2.7 million. That figure was first reported by Jim Callis of MLB.com.

Yorke’s selection was perhaps the biggest surprise of the entire draft as most experts had him ranked somewhere around or even below the 100 spot on their class rankings, but the Red Sox took him with the 17th overall pick. The reasoning was two-fold, with the first part being that they really liked him as a player. Whether or not they really thought he was among the 17 best prospects in the class is a different question, but they legitimately see an infielder — he’s probably going to settle in at second base — with potential for a plus hit tool and some room to grow power. If you like a guy, you have to take him, and with the Red Sox lacking a second round pick they had to be aggressive.

It was also known from the get-go that this was going to be an underslot bonus, which also points back to them lacking a second rounder. They needed to do more with less in this class, and they felt the best course of action was to go underslot with a player they liked here to save money and get a player better than their slot value in round three, which turned into the aforementioned Jordan. Now we know exactly how much underslot they went, with Yorke getting $2.7 million compared to the slot value of $3,609,700.

The Red Sox now have their final two picks, Jeremy Wu-Yelland and Shane Drohan, left unsigned. Assuming the Red Sox are willing to go up to five percent over their allotted slot — any more than five percent and teams face steep penalties — they have a total of $936,395 to spend on those two selections. That is roughly $80,000 above the combined slot value of the two picks. It seems most likely that Wu-Yelland will come in a bit underslot and Drohan a bit over.