The Chicago Cubs officially announced their 2019 draft signings, and – likely to their own disappointment – there were a couple absent names.
The #Cubs signed 30 selections from the 2019 First-Year Player Draft ahead of today's deadline. pic.twitter.com/HnZUXFwLfa
— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) July 12, 2019
Although it was going late into the signing season, it was expected that the Cubs would be able to sign at least one – and likely both – of 10th rounder Wyatt Hendrie and 11th rounder Mack Chambers, interesting junior college prospects who you’d love to have in the system. But things got thorny at the end for reasons we don’t quite know, and neither player wound up signing.
So that’s a bummer.
The good news is that it did not impact their signing pool in a significant way, as they were still able to sign everyone else in their top 32 picks.
They also used significant money, relatively speaking, to sign a late-rising undrafted arm:
The @Cubs may not have signed their 10th-rder but did land a nice arm in Georgia Southern RHP Joe Nahas. He came on late & looked VG in the @Official_CCBL, running his fastball up to 95 mph & backing it up with a solid slider. His $135k bonus is the most for a NDFA this year.
— Jim Callis (@jimcallisMLB) July 13, 2019
We’ll have to dig in more on Nahas soon, because a guy with a unique story who transferred schools could easily be missed in the draft … and then he blew up in the Cape Cod League this summer. That could actually be “a guy,” despite him being originally undrafted. Don’t get me wrong, most picks are unlikely to rise even above A-ball, but Nahas is getting a bonus you more typically seen given to good college players in rounds 15 to 30. That’s a good sign.
More on the draft class here, here, and here.