The Red Sox went bargain-hunting on Day 2 of the draft and it's already paying off. Boston's front office locked up RHP Lucas Davenport, its fifth-round pick out of Baylor, for $350,000, a full $104,100 south of the $454,100 slot value attached to pick No. 156.
Jim Callis broke the signing news and the numbers behind the underslot deal.
That savings matters. Teams pool their bonus-pool money across the whole draft, so shaving six figures off a fifth-rounder's price tag is exactly how clubs find room to overpay a tougher sign later on. Davenport, for his part, doesn't need to be paid like a first-rounder to be an interesting bet — he's 6-foot-6, 230 pounds, and still relatively new to pitching at a high level after stops at Texas A&M and Blinn College, where he helped win a 2024 NJCAA Division I Junior College World Series before landing at Baylor.
The stuff is the whole pitch here. Davenport's fastball sits 92-97 mph, and scouts keep circling the delivery as the separator — a funky arm action paired with the extension that comes from being 6-foot-6, which lets the ball get on hitters faster than the radar gun alone suggests. He pairs it with a mid-80s cutter and a slider that's drawn praise as his best secondary, sitting in the low-80s with late, lateral bite.
His 2026 numbers at Baylor won't jump off the page — a 6.25 ERA over 13 starts — but the underlying indicators moved in the right direction, with his strikeout rate climbing to 24.6% and his walk rate dropping to 5.7%, evidence that a redshirt junior with a big frame was still figuring out how to turn raw stuff into consistent results. For a team paying under slot, that's the profile: pay for the arm strength and the deception now, bet player development can smooth out the rest.
Boston has made a habit of stacking pitching depth in the middle rounds of recent drafts, and Davenport slots right into that plan — a project with a legitimate power fastball who costs less than his draft slot suggests. With the July 27 signing deadline still on the calendar for the rest of the class, this is the kind of quiet, underslot deal that ends up funding the picks that actually make the front page.