{"id":369678,"date":"2026-07-11T18:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T18:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/369678\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T18:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T18:26:08","slug":"grady-emerson-picked-by-tampa-bay-rays-in-2026-mlb-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/369678\/","title":{"rendered":"Grady Emerson picked by Tampa Bay Rays in 2026 MLB Draft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.statesman.com\/sports\/college\/baseball\/article\/texas-baseball-2026-national-signing-day-21172221.php\" data-link=\"native\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"\">Grady Emerson <\/a>likely won&#8217;t be headed to Austin. The star North Texas infielder committed to play for Texas baseball, but he now has the opportunity to sign for millions as a top pick in the MLB draft.<\/p>\n<p>The Tampa Bay Rays made him the second overall pick Saturday in Philadelphia. The Fort Worth Christian prospect recorded a .532 batting average and a 1.013 OPS as a senior and was projected to be taken in the top three of the MLB draft.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>MLB&#8217;s Pipeline scouting service gave him an overall scouting grade of 65 for his advanced approach at the plate, mature decision-making and polished all-around game. ESPN ranked him second among its top 250 draft prospects. He was a top-five D1Baseball prospect at the time of his commitment, as well.<\/p>\n<p>He originally committed to TCU but changed to Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The MLB draft&#8217;s first four rounds are Saturday, and finishes on Sunday with rounds 5-20.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Grady Emerson likely won&#8217;t be headed to Austin. The star North Texas infielder committed to play for Texas&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369679,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[62623,27,29,537,20340,28],"class_list":["post-369678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-mlb-draft","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-longhorns","tag-texas-longhorns-baseball","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}