Florida Baseball: Five best all-time Gator commits that went pro instead

One of the realities for Florida baseball is that they have players commit while in high school that will never arrive in Gainesville because of where they get drafted in the MLB Draft. Keep in mind that a player can either sign with an MLB team straight out of high school or he has to wait three years before becoming draft eligible again.

And the Gators can attest to some super-talented players that committed to play at Florida but never made it to Gainesville.

So we here at Hail Florida Hail took a look at the list of players that had committed to Florida but ended up being drafted while in high school and signed a contract. Even though the Gators have had a ton of commits drafted in the first round, not all of those made it to the MLB.

For the purpose of this list, we looked at the five players that have had the most successful MLB careers.

We used the database from Perfect Game, so this list only goes back to 2008.

Florida Baseball commits that went pro: Christian Arroyo

Originally committed to the Gators in 2013 in a class that would include future big leagues AJ Puk and some guy named Pete Alonso, Christian Arroyo was a middle infielder out of Spring Hill, FL drafted by the San Francisco Giants in the first round in 2013.

He signed with the Giants and made his MLB debut in 2017.

He bounced around to the Tampa Bay Rays and Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) before settling with the Boston Red Sox.

Arroyo has a career batting average in MLB of .256 and a career WAR (Wins Above Replacement) of 2.1.