Pirates agree to terms with Cole Tucker

The Pirates have agreed to terms with first-round pick Cole Tucker, Chris Cotillo tweets. WTM mentioned this elsewhere, but it deserves its own post. Tucker gets $1.8 million, which only saves the Pirates about $125,000 against their bonus pool.

It doesn't appear, then, that the Pirates drafted Tucker with the intention of saving a ton of money to sign other picks later. They simply apparently liked him much more than Baseball America or MLB.com did. That might be a little weird, but like I said on Twitter earlier today, it's easy to win praise for your draft -- all you have to do is taking BA's best available player with every pick. It's the Yahoo-autodraft approach, and anyone can do it. The Pirates are, effectively, saying that they've watched Tucker a bunch, and they have a better read on him than outsiders do. We'll see if they turn out to be right, and I'm skeptical enough about Tucker's hitting to wonder if they are, but you want your team's scouting department to have that kind of confidence.