Kevin Goldstein's recent Baseball Prospectus podcast has some interesting gossip on Pirates' second-round MLB Draft pick Josh Bell. Bell sent out a letter saying that he did not want to be drafted and that he wanted to head to the University of Texas. If that hadn't happened, he certainly would have been a first-round draft pick.
However, Bell enlisted the help of Scott Boras to guide him through the draft process. And now Goldstein is saying - for whatever it's worth - that Major League Baseball could have removed Bell from the draft altogether, and that Bell's mother said, "Oh no, don't do that."
Take that with a grain of salt for now. This doesn't yet sound like an assertion Goldstein will be willing to stand behind. But it will be interesting to see exactly how signable Bell turns out to be. The Pirates won't be shy about paying out to get him, so we're going to find out how much he really wants to go to college, and whether his stated desire to get an education was just a business ploy.