The Cubs don't usually make headlines in mid-July for a guy who isn't even close to the majors, but here we are. Chicago has officially signed Myles Bailey, its supplemental second-round pick out of Florida State, and the deal says a lot about how much the front office believes in what this kid can do once his ankle heals.
Supplemental 2nd-rder Myles Bailey signs w/@Cubs for $1.9 million (slot 75 value = $1,120,900). @FSUBaseball 1B, best power in entire @MLBDraft, 13 HR & .913 SLG in 26 G this spring before breaking ankle on slide. Also surprisingly athletic for 6-4/257.
$1.9 million for the 75th overall pick isn't a typo — that's roughly $780,000 over the assigned slot value of $1,120,900. Teams don't hand out that kind of premium unless they think they're getting first-round talent at a discount, and with Bailey, the case is easy to make. Before the injury, scouts were calling him the best raw power bat in the entire class.
That's what makes the ankle injury sting. Bailey was in the middle of a monster sophomore year at Florida State — 13 home runs and a .913 slugging percentage in just 26 games — when he broke his ankle sliding into second base and his season ended right there. For a guy who was a unanimous Freshman All-American in 2025 and had built a career .337 average with 32 home runs across his two seasons in Tallahassee, watching the rest of the year get wiped out by one slide was brutal timing heading into a draft year.
It's also exactly why he fell to pick 75 in the first place. Teams with premium first-round picks weren't going to gamble on a guy who couldn't finish games, run the bases, or show off his athleticism in the weeks before the draft. The Cubs, picking outside the top rounds, got to scoop up a player some evaluators had rated as a legitimate first-round bat purely because of health risk — and they paid him like one anyway.
At 6-foot-4, 257 pounds, Bailey doesn't look the part of a nimble athlete, but that's reportedly one of the more surprising parts of his profile — plus-raw power packaged with better-than-expected agility for a guy his size. Once he's cleared to play again, the Cubs are betting that combination turns into exactly the kind of middle-of-the-order thump their farm system has been light on.
For now, Bailey's job is just to get healthy. The power was never in question — the swing that produced a .913 SLG in a month's worth of games doesn't disappear because of a bad step into second base. The only question left is how quickly the ankle lets him get back to proving it.