Bubba Starling signs with Royals

All day Monday, there was silence. Most of the night, too.

No word from the Royals. No word from their coveted first-round selection from June’s amateur baseball draft, Bubba Starling, a center fielder and multi-sport phenom from Gardner Edgerton High School.
Starling had a football scholarship to the University of Nebraska waiting for him if he spurned the Royals’ advances, and as the clock neared zero on Monday’s deadline of 11 p.m. Central time, the silence continued.
Royals general manager Dayton Moore waited inside Kauffman Stadium, later saying the talks finally heated up in the final five to six minutes. Inside his home in Gardner, Bubba and his family waited for the last 10 seconds before the call was made.
Finally, that silence was broken. Ending perhaps the most watched negotiations in franchise history, Starling set aside his flirtation with the Cornhuskers and accepted the Royals’ offer of a club-record signing bonus to play professional baseball.
“I got a lot of adrenaline going through me right now,” Moore said. “I’m trying to compose it.”
The deal will pay Starling $7.5 million spread over three years. The Royals said Starling will be introduced at Kauffman Stadium this week before leaving for the Royals’ spring training facility in Surprise, Ariz.
Agent Scott Boras advised Starling throughout the summer and at one point was believed to be seeking a deal approaching $10 million. The Royals were thought to have countered at $7.5 million before communication between the two camps dried up.
Had he chosen to attend school at Nebraska, Starling would have been the highest first-round pick to go unsigned since outfielder J.D. Drew, another Boras client, who was selected No. 2 overall by the Phillies in 1997.
This is not the first time the Royals and Moore have dealt with a Boras-advised selection. In fact, the Royals have drafted Boras players in the first round of five of the last six drafts. And for the third time in the last five years, the negotiations bled extremely close to Major League Baseball’s hard and fast deadline for teams to reach agreement with their unsigned draft picks.
In 2007, No. 2 overall pick Mike Moustakas agreed to a $4 million bonus just 10 minutes before the deadline. One year later, Eric Hosmer signed for a then club record $6 million in the final minutes.
Starling followed the same pattern.
“I sweat them all out,” Moore said. “And this was particularly tough. We knew on draft day, and prior to draft day, that this had a chance to work really, really good, or it had a chance to go wrong.”
Now the deal is done and a sigh of relief is spreading from the front office at Kauffman Stadium to the high school fields in Gardner, where Starling matured into one of the most accomplished prep athletes in Kansas City history.
In signing Starling, the Royals acquire an extremely marketable player who was generally viewed as the best athlete in the draft — a 6-foot-5, 195-pounder with the size and speed to be a Division I quarterback and a set of baseball tools that prompted Royals scouting director Lonnie Goldberg to call Starling the draft’s “most electric” player.
“Lonnie has had his vision on this kid for three years; that’s all he’s spoken about,” Moore said. “And he gets a lot of credit … for the vision and going after this player and selling this player to us as an organization.”
On the other side, Starling is now an overnight millionaire while receiving the opportunity to play for the team for which he grew up cheering — a prospect that he once described as a dream.
“This is his boyhood team, and this is where he wants to be,” Moore said. “He’s gonna take the field every day in the minor leagues with that vision of playing here in Kansas City.”
Starling now becomes one of the top prospects in a minor league system that graduated a wave of potential cornerstones to the major leagues during the past three months. The Royals can point to the money invested in Starling as evidence that the organization continues to bury a past in which talented players were passed over in the draft because the organization deemed them too expensive.
By the time news of Starling’s decision arrived late Monday night, the Royals had committed more than $12 million in known bonuses to their 2011 draft class.
And after 11 p.m. on Monday, Moore could leave the negotiations and the waiting behind.
“It really hasn’t sunk in yet,” Moore said. “But I know tomorrow we’re gonna wake up with smiles on our face and look forward to moving on in Bubba’s development in our system