When first-round pick Dylan Covey and the Brewers announced before the deadline that he would not be signing, it seemed peculiar. With more than an hour remaining to negotiate before the deadline there still seemed to be time to bridge any disagreements over the size of the signing bonus.

But the decision not to sign ended up not being about money. Covey has been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, which led him to decide to head to San Diego instead of signing with the Brewers. The diagnosis was first reported by the Baseball Beginnings Website.

Covey's condition was discovered when he underwent a physical last week in preparation for the possibility of signing with the Brewers. Milwaukee was willing to still sign him, but according to Baseball America correspondent/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel beat writer Tom Haudricourt, Covey and his family decided it would be better to stay close to home and learn how to deal with diabetes while attending college. Haudricourt also reported that the family's decision was made much tougher by MLB's draft rules, which compressed this decision into one day.

"I'll probably now be a Brewer fan the rest of my life because these guys were great with us. It just became evident that we felt more comfortable with Dylan being in school, only a couple of hours away. I don't want to shed a bad light on the Brewers at all," Darrell Covey, Dylan Covey's father, told Haudricourt. The bottom line is that we didn't have a lot of time to make this decision, so we went with our gut feeling. We couldn't even sleep on it. But Dylan went down to the UCLA diabetes center today and talked with the director there; got all the information he could.

Covey will become the first Brewers' first-round pick to go unsigned since Kenny Henderson in 1991.