MLB losing Murray is a self inflicted wound

With a league full of scouts, you’d think that Major League Baseball might have picked up the curveball that Kyler Murray was preparing to throw at them coming.

MLB never got the bat off its shoulder.

Murray was supposed to throw MLB a meatball. He was going to fix its “black baseball player” problem, giving a generation of young players, particularly young Africanamericans, someone to look up to and say, “that could be me one day.”

That all went away this week when Murray declared for the NFL draft. And although Murray could still show up when the Oakland A’s open camp next month, two weeks before the NFL Combine, everything about this feels like Murray has taken batting practice for the last time. How did MLB get here? The short answer is that the league forgot who it is, and for that matter, who Murray is.

The long answer is a little more complex.

After the Oakland A’s drafted Murray ninth overall in last June’s draft, the A’s thought they had their man, and MLB believed it had finally secured an African-american prospect who could eventually be one of the faces of the league.

After signing Murray to a deal that included a $4.66 million signing bonus, the two sides agreed upon a deal that would allow Murray to play one final year of football at Oklahoma before trading in his football cleats for baseball spikes.

But we all know how that ended, as Murray put together one of the single greatest seasons in college football history with over 5,300 yards of total offense to go along with 54 touchdowns, while beating out Alabama’s Tua Tagovailoa for the Heisman Trophy after Tua had been the front runner for almost an entire calendar year.

With whispers that Murray was leaning toward declaring for the NFL draft and sticking with football, stories began to surface that MLB and the A’s were doing everything they could, and maybe some things they technically couldn’t, to change Murray’s mind.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that executives from the team and the league met with Murray to come up with “something creative” to keep him away from the gridiron. With rules set up within MLB to stop players from signing major league contracts that will put them on a 40-man roster straight out of the draft, Oakland was possibly working on a deal that would give Murray a longterm extension and pay him more money.