Rusney Castillo reminds us how screwed amateur players can be

Rusney Castillo isn’t a prospect. He’s 27, and he’s supposed to help a major league team right away. The Red Sox were already flush with outfield options, both in the short and long term, but the idea of a potential superstar making regular-player money over the next six years was just too intoxicating to pass up.

We can still use Castillo to explore how prospects in the draft pool get hosed every danged year, though. Every danged year.

No, Castillo isn’t a prospect, but he sure is an unknown, a wild, confusing unknown. We have the scouting reports and videos, and we have the comparables (Ron Gant, Yasiel Puig, or Rajai Davis, a group so wildly disparate that the comparisons border on useless). We have the Davenport Translations on his Cuban stats:

And we have a list of center fielders 5’9” and shorter over the last 25 years:

The one thing we don’t have, though, is a clue what Castillo going to do in the majors. In that sense, he is a prospect. He’s fully developed, so there’s no wondering about how he’s going to grow into his body like organizations do with high school kids; he’s grown. Even so, Castillo is an unknown quantity of the highest order, just like any player drafted in the amateur draft.

Teams were lining up to sign this unknown quantity for tens of millions of dollars.

Castillo got just over nine times the largest bonus ever handed out in the draft, the $8 million Gerrit Cole received from the Pirates. That’s partially because the Red Sox are expecting Castillo to help the 2015 team, which makes this something of an apples/oranges comparison, but he’s getting the money mostly because the Red Sox could give it to him. Here’s what Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino said about Miguel Alfredo Gonzalez:

€œThe main drawback [of trading for a pitcher] for us would be giving up the prospects. That’€™s the hard thing. Reaching into your pocket for your wallet is much easier.

Reaching into your pocket for your wallet is much easier. It’s much easier for the Red Sox, and it’s much easier for the other teams scrambling for Castillo, like the Giants and Tigers. They were lining up for this unknown. Just as they would happily line up to do the same thing for selected amateur players in the draft.

Let’s talk about which amateur players would benefit most if the draft disappeared. It wouldn’t necessarily be all of them. Teams would go nuts for the top talent, and there might be some trickle-up consequences for the players at the bottom. There might be fewer teams willing to pay $141,000 for the 10th-round talents of the world, so there would be something of a butterfly effect that we can’t quite grasp yet.

Focus on two types:

Those two types of amateur player are getting hosed. Forever and always. Castillo is just the latest reminder that teams will take all sorts of risks when it comes to unknown players with a chance to outperform their contracts. The Red Sox are paying Castillo $72.5 million because they’re guessing that they’re getting a $145 million player on clearance. The Nationals paid $7.5 million for Stephen Strasburg because he had almost no other option.

Take Chris Sale. How many teams saw a majors-ready talent who could help a rotation or bullpen almost immediately? Just the White Sox? Two teams? All 30, to varying degrees? For the purposes of this discussion, let’s pretend the answer was three. Let’s pretend there were three teams who were absolutely convinced that Sale would need no more than a dozen games in the minors, if that.

What Sale got from the White Sox in 2010: $1,656,000.

That’s third-tier LOOGY money. Get three teams in the bidding -- three teams absolutely convinced that he’s an instant closer or rotation boost, who weren’t scared of his box-of-paper-clips-in-a-wind-tunnel delivery -- and he blows past that. Three years, $10 million for a closer? Sure. Unless he’s a starter worth five years and $20 million. Unless ...

Teams would come, Ray. Teams would come. Just look at the pennywhistles and moon pies that Rusney Castillo can buy now, even though no one knows exactly how he compares to the 90 best outfielders around the league. The headline for this could just as easily be “Scott Boras makes an excellent point about the draft” or “Scott Boras, unlikely freedom fighter” or “Agreeing with Scott Boras and then taking a long, long shower,” because Boras mentions this same point every June. And Boras was the guy who found loopholes to make Travis Lee and Matt White free agents in 1996, eventually getting them contracts that, if they were draft bonuses, would still be the two largest draft bonuses in history today.

Repeat: Matt White and Travis Lee were paid more as free agents almost 20 years ago than any player in the draft has received as a bonus since.

This isn’t a call to action. This isn’t a post with suggestions on how to attack the CBA. This isn’t an editorial slamming MLB and the MLBPA for conspiring to allow this. It’s just a note directing your attention to the Red Sox, who paid an awful lot of money for a player who might not be good at all, and being positively giddy about their ability to do so. If Castillo is the next Puig, we’ll spend the next decade saying, “What a bargain! What a bargain!”, even though he was paid exponentially more for his first deal than almost every other unknown-yet-fascinating talent is.