It's truly starting now for Ethan Salas, the teen catcher with a $5.6 million international signing bonus inked by the Padres, the largest among Major League Baseball's 2023 class.
Until this moment, Salas was an abstract of a baseball player. Scribbled to life in the notebooks of far-flung scouts. Dissected on back-room draft boards. Plugged into the analytics-dicing thinking that rules modern baseball.
The Padres are banking — literally, given that he received 96.1 percent of the franchise's signing pool cash — on the player who blossomed in Venezuela with more tools than a Home Depot.
