Curry: Yankees making progress in talks with first round pick Blake Rutherford

According to Jack Curry, the Yankees are making progress in contract talks with first round pick Blake Rutherford. “Stay tuned,” said Curry’s source. Jack is the single most plugged in reporter covering the Yankees, so not only is there no reason to doubt his report, I’m going to assume a deal is pretty close to done at this point.

Slot money for the 18th overall pick is $2.44M, and as our Draft Pool Tracker shows, the Yankees currently have $3.28M or so in bonus pool space remaining. I should probably note I had an error on the Tracker page. I previously said the team only had $3.14M in bonus pool space, but one of the calculations was wrong, so it’s actually $3.28M. My bad, yo.

The signing deadline is Friday, July 15th this year. That’s two weeks from Friday. It’s not uncommon for first rounders to wait until the deadline to sign — James Kaprielian did it last year — but hopefully Rutherford signs before that. The Yankees may not be offering the full $3.28M at the moment, so Rutherford he try to wait them out.

Pretty much everything you need to know about Rutherford is right here. I also looked at similar players drafted in recent years. He’s in pretty excellent company. Rutherford was a projected top ten pick heading into the draft, though he fell to the Yankees due to signability concerns.