A year after not signing with the Mets, Kumar Rocker is officially a member of the Rangers, after being taken with the No. 3 pick in the MLB draft on Sunday. However, Rocker’s advisors still seem to be upset with how last year’s draft went down.
On The Show podcast with Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman, Scott Boras, who has represented Rocker since last year, said he told Mets owner Steve Cohen he has to learn from the mistake he made by not signing Rocker.
“I told Steve Cohen that while you’re an owner, you just have to listen to people that appraise certain elements of drafted players. And we strongly disagree with the appraisal that the Mets placed on Kumar,” Boras said, via Audacy. “We had said that to him, as an advocate—I’m sure if I’m an owner I’m gonna look at this and say I expect the advocate to say that for the player—our medical staff, we have our own internal medical staff, we were very thorough about this.”
Additionally, Boras mentioned he doesn’t think teams should consider MRIs too much when signing players.
“There are always fuzzy MRIs, Max Scherzer’s MRI when he signed was not particularly great and frankly never has been,” he said. “But the thing of it is, it’s what the orthopedists say are going to be the primary factors for what makes a player healthy, and if you had to make a minor adjustment in the process it would be a minor element and he would be back to throwing at the levels that Kumar is capable of.”
At the time, the Mets chose not to sign their 2021 No. 10 pick because they were concerned with the health of his arm after conducting a physical.
Immediately after not signing, Boras said Rocker was “healthy according to independent medical by multiple prominent baseball orthopedic surgeons.” Boras doubled down on that notion on The Show as well.
“In the end… all these reviews came back and said he passed, and the Mets didn’t believe that,” he said. “And now, ironically, the Texas Rangers draft him and their doctor all along says that he is certainly physically capable of carrying out a Major League career. Medical dynamic, really not a scouting dynamic, truthfully, and that happens sometime in sport.”
Despite Boras downplaying the situation, Rocker still reportedly had shoulder surgery in September that Boras described as a “minor scope.”
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