The Mets’ agreement with their first-round draft pick Kumar Rocker is in limbo after the team expressed concerns with the right-hander’s pitching elbow during his physical examination, multiple industry sources told The Post.
Rocker’s camp disagrees with those concerns, citing the pitcher’s durability at Vanderbilt, leading to a stalemate as Sunday’s 5 p.m. signing deadline approaches.
Rocker, whom the Mets drafted 10th overall, had agreed to a $6 million signing bonus on draft day pending the physical. The two sides could either sign off on a smaller figure, part ways altogether, or move forward with the original deal if the Mets determine that he’s worth the risk.
If an agreement can’t be reached, Rocker could return to Vanderbilt for his senior year, aim to get selected even higher in 2022 and earn outside money through the NCAA’s name, image and likeness allowance in the meantime.
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1. Hombre BrotaniThere's a decent chance Rocker would end up having TJ surgery at some point anyway so potentially getting it out of the way now doesn't seem like an absolute deal-breaker, although it does warrant a reduction in price.
On the other side, my understanding is that Rocker's stock was already falling going into the draft, so betting that he'll do just as well after another year in college is really a roll of the dice. And how much could he possibly earn in endorsements as a college player? Even Mike Trout supposedly only makes $3.5 million per year from them, and most of the other top paid MLB players make sub-$1 million.
Because he wants to get paid like he's healthy and too many teams were worried by the velocity drop.
Boras: are you kidding me? How could he possibly be injured? He’s pitched 790 innings the last two years. Hell, he once threw 180 pitches against Kentucky. Does that sound like an injured pitcher to you?
Because teams are (usually) not dumb enough to hand out millions of dollars without checking out the merchandise. There's a reason people do home inspections before they buy a house. If someone comes to you and says "hey, I want you to pay full price for this product" then you ask to see and examine the product first and they respond with "no, everything is fine but you can't look at it or touch it and there are no returns allowed" are you going to buy it? Of course not.
Depends on the market. Some places where there are always multiple bidders, it's very difficult or impossible to buy unless you waive inspection. But Kumar does not have multiple bidders, and pitching another year in college seems like an extreme risk.
That really doesn't make any sense. If I own a house that's sound, requiring the waiving of inspection is going to reduce the price I get. If four people are bidding $500,000 w/o inspection, I can likely get one of then to pay $510,000 to have the right of inspection. The only party who benefits from no inspection is someone trying to unload a shitty house.
I wonder if he would instead just take most of the year off to rest his arm, then throw a few innings in an indy league to showcase himself. Luke Hochevar basically did that and parlayed himself into being a #1 pick.
You would think so, but the market doesn’t always behave rationally. And the real estate market still has a fair amount of inefficiency, uncertain timing, etc. Some people don’t want to or can’t afford to deal with that (say, if you’re moving for a new job) and are willing to take the risk around the inspection assuming they can fix any issues that are found later.
As someone halfway through selling two houses this summer, I disagree. The inspection contingency is an opportunity for the buyer to demand concessions from the seller. Like "fix this issue" (no home is without issues, even those in good condition) or "credit me $XX to deal with this" or I'll walk away. The cost of the buyer walking away is enormous to the seller. Even an as-is sale with an inspection contingency isn't really as-is because the buyer can walk away if they don't like the result of the inspection, which gives them leverage to negotiate in a more advantageous position.
Which is to say, even if my house is in good condition and I've done honest work to prepare it for sale (I have), I'm taking $500k without an inspection over $510k with an inspection 10 times out of 10.
I'm guessing you don't have experience with this.
I've bought a house, and would never do so without an inspection (just like I would never buy a used car without having a mechanic look at it). It's just dumb. A house could be hiding hundreds of thousands of dollars in needed repairs. Bad foundation, faulty wiring, dry rot. You just don't take those kind of risks, when the downside could be the entire purchase price, less the land value.
My father and law and one of my best friends are in construction, but even after they looked at it, they insisted we get an inspection. The real estate market is riddled with people who do dumb things. I don't have to be one of them. There's no special house. If you won't sell me yours with an inspection, someone else will.
We had to pay for our inspection, but if markets are going to be irrational, you just don't participate. We bought in 2007, which was a very frothy market. We refused to bid. My wife probably looked at 100 houses before we picked one.
#20 if you can do that, good for you. But if your company is relocating you across the country and you only have a couple of weekends to look at houses, or you want to move someplace before the school year starts so your kids don't have to change schools in the middle of the year, then you simply don't have that luxury.
Or to put it another way, your time also has value.
Institutional buyers are also working with a lot more data than you presumably were, and they're buying a portfolio of homes so the risk of one or two needing a bunch of work is not as big of a deal. In many cases they're already planning to do a major renovation. So if you're an individual consumer and you're competing against institutional buyers, you may need to make some concessions you wouldn't have done in 2007.
Then rent. Overpaying on a rental is small potatoes.
I'm sticking with my guess that you don't have experience with this.
Housing prices were plummeting by 2007.
No, they were flat in the first half. They didn't start really falling until very late 2007 and 2008. I worked in the MBS industry, I know exactly when they tanked.
The Case Schiller Weiss index for the US was basically flat from late 2005 through Oct. 2007, then it started to rapidly decline. NY didn't start to decline seriously until mid-2008.
I'm sticking with my guess that you don't have experience with this.
I've bought a house successfully. I'm sitting in it.
Then rent. Overpaying on a rental is small potatoes.
I don't know who you're arguing with here. I'm just trying to describe/explain people's behavior in the real world. I'm not saying that it's completely rational, or asking for your seal of approval.
I do some work with clients who buy homes to renovate and resell, and have looked at a fair number of houses myself over the past couple of years, so I feel like I have a pretty good sense of the market. It's very different from 2007 or even when I bought my current home in 2015.
And that is because you did not have multiple bidders driving up housing prices like you did for years before that.
But you have obviously not experienced what we are specifically discussing here -- a housing market where you simply cannot buy a house if you don't waive inspection. And I know that because the things you are saying are just wrong, which many more experienced people have told you.
Which worked out great for him...but for the Royals, not so much. (His 78 ERA+ was the worst in MLB from 2008-12, minimum 700 IP).
I don't remember all of the draft rules. If they don't sign him, do the Mets get a compensation pick next year?
I bought a house a year ago. Both the house we sold and the house we bought had inspections.
In the specific case of Rocker, it would actually have made some sense to get an MRI done privately and share it with teams if it came out clean. He's definitely worth $6 million if the arm is healthy, and there was a significant risk he'd have to settle for late first round money if teams thought he was injured.
Stop the presses!
You just insisted you "simply can not buy a house if you don't waive inspection." That was not my experience.
snapper's explanation of the situation is completely wrong
/Captain Obvious meme
No matter the market, snapper's explanation of the situation is completely wrong (that only people with a dud of a house would demand that).
If you wanted to buy a place last summer in the greater Toronto area, however, it almost certainly would have applied - houses were regularly selling without conditions within 24 hours of posting for significantly (as in the range of several hundred thousand dollars) over asking. There was no incentive for the sellers to allow an inspection, as the sellers would have another half-dozen over asking offers available to them, so why waste their own time allowing the buyer to do something that could only decrease the selling price?
He didn't specify a location. If he meant this only applies to a few markets, that's not the way his posts came across.
By the way, I was one of multiple bidders on the home we acquired. The inspection was simply an expected part of the transaction here.
Right this is the part snapper gets wrong. It's (generally) not sellers saying "no inspections allowed!" It's 20 of the 25 (over-asking!) bidders offering to waive the inspection so that their bid stands out in the sea of bidders.
How few is few? People are waiving inspections all over Florida now (which I think is bananas, but here we are).
Well no, not a single homogeneous market, but I interpreted his comments to be speaking far more broadly about the housing market, not small pockets here and there.
For some reason, I recall you living in Indiana. If I'm correct about the location, I can see the demand for housing there being somewhat less so than many other markets.
I sold in Indiana, bought in Cook County, Illinois (specifically, the Chicago suburbs).
Honestly, I was merely relating my recent experience as a homebuyer/seller in 32. It didn't warrant the snark in 34.
So agreeing to not have a contingency based on a barn inspection allowed us to become the only potential buyer, signing the P&S agreement; we still got the inspection, which we paid for, and if for some reason there was something that came out of it that was a complete deal-breaker (which we thought was unlikely), then we could walk away for $10K. Other people were looking at this house every day, but by making this agreement, it froze the market. The cost of doing so, and taking a small risk that we might decide to back out, was putting $10K on the line. It all worked out, we got the house for $45K less than was listing at that moment, and we love the house.
My point to this is that we are certainly not the only people figuring stuff like this out, and in this crazy housing market, you have to find a way to separate yourself from the 20 other people coming to see the house this week. Agreeing to waive the inspection is *definitely* in the seller's interest, and if you are willing to risk your security deposit, it is *definitely* in the buyer's interest, too.
For the life of me I cannot think of why I would have included the first four words here if I believed you couldn't buy a house anywhere without waiving inspection.
I also don't see what difference it makes if I thought there were a lot or a few markets where you have to waive inspection. I have no idea how many there are, but I can tell you I live in one. Go back 15 years, and most of you did too.
And who cares if it's few or many? They exist, and those were very clearly and explicitly was referring to.
You could look at it both ways. On one hand, you expect to find things broken, etc., in a 190 year old house so if you're operating in good faith with your eyes open, when the inspection report comes back and says the back porch needs extensive repairs, the windows are all beyond their useful life, and there are leaks in the basement, you don't freak out and you don't demand the owner fix it. But not every buyer is going to approach it that way, which is a reason for the seller not to want to accept an inspection if they don't have to. This is not "trying to unload a shitty house."
On a baseball note, we can now get to Fenway via commuter rail with very short walks on both ends.
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