Deering High senior Trejyn Fletcher was selected by the St. Louis Cardinals in the second round of Major League Baseball’s amateur draft late Monday night, the 58th player drafted overall.
The outfielder stands to receive a potential signing bonus of more than $1 million.
His selection is the highest for any Maine native since another Deering player, Ryan Flaherty, was taken No. 41 in the 2008 MLB draft. Flaherty went on to play seven seasons in the major leagues.
Fletcher has committed to play college baseball at Vanderbilt University, the No. 2 ranked team in the nation. Now he’ll have to make a decision whether to start professional baseball or go to college. Players have until Aug. 15 or they enroll in college to negotiate a deal.
Fletcher was the 22nd high school player chosen, the seventh high school outfielder. He could not be reached for comment after his selection late Monday night.
Trejyn Fletcher batted .456 with three home runs this spring. He was 17-of-17 in steal attempts. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
The slot value for the signing bonus as the 58th pick is $1,214,300. Slot value is not a guarantee of what an individual player will receive for a signing bonus. Teams have a maximum amount of signing money in what is called a bonus pool. Each team’s bonus pool is the sum of the slot values for all of their picks in the first 10 rounds.
Fletcher, 18, first started to gain attention on a national level in his early teens. He was invited to a home run derby contest and hit a 401-foot homer out of Marlins Park in Miami as a 13-year-old. After playing varsity football, basketball and baseball at Cheverus High as a freshman, Fletcher transferred to Trinity-Pawling School, a private boarding school in Pawling, New York, and repeated his freshman year of school.
While attending Trinity-Pawling and through exposure at high-level showcase tournaments, Fletcher continued to impress. He was Perfect Game’s No. 1 ranked player in the Class of 2020 before returning to Portland, enrolling at Deering, and reclassifying to the Class of 2019.
This season at Deering, the 6-foot-2, 200-pound Fletcher played most of his games in front of several professional scouts, as teams scrambled to assess his overall game a year sooner than they expected. Fletcher is considered to have plus raw power as a hitter, a plus throwing arm and very good speed. He is projected as an outfielder but does have a plus-90 mph fastball. In 16 games for Deering, he batted .456 with three home runs and scored 24 runs. In four games as a pitcher, he struck out 40 hitters in 20 innings, allowing seven hits.
Prior to the draft, Baseball America rated Fletcher No. 64 on its top 500 list, which included all of the college players eligible for the draft. MLB.com pegged Fletcher at No. 87.
Only three players who played high school ball in Maine have been taken in the first round: pitcher Bill Swift (South Portland High/University of Maine), No. 2 overall in 1984; pitcher Mark Rogers (Mt. Ararat High), No. 5 overall in 2004; and Flaherty (Deering High/Vanderbilt), a shortstop taken 41st as a supplemental first-rounder in 2008.
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