I might have an unpopular take, but I'd rather trade Bregman to keep Tucker than the other way around. Bregman is a little over two years older and Tucker is barely reaching his peak potential, whatever it may be. The Astros are still in a great spot to make whatever moves they need to keep Tucker. I'm pretty positive Tucker is an Astro for most of his career.
So you would rather see: Kyle Tucker in RF and Joe Perez or Will Wagner at 3B Than Jacob Melton or Pedro Leon in RF and Alex Bregman at 3B In 2026? There are 2 major issues 1) which (if either) is willing to sign a deal the team is willing to offer. 2) which is the least replaceable At this point I think its Bregman on both
Tucker could very well command literally 2x the total amount Bregman will require. It's not about who will be better, as much as it is who will be affordable to risk averse Crane. Tucker being 3 years younger is a huge factor in why he will command so much more. Crane has not shown a willingness to go any where near 10/300, which will be Tuckers ballpark if he doesn't have a drop off. Bregman will likely only be able to get a 5 or 6 year deal unless he really blows up the next 2 seasons
I don't think we sign him without some sort of hometown discount. $18M AAV still makes him the second highest paid 2B in MLB. He'll be 35, the cost is going to be around $20M or so and I think that'd be pretty fair considering he isn't winning batting titles or stealing 40 bases anymore.
It's also about the farm system. Astros have the most depth in the system at outfield. 13 of the top 30 prospects are outfielders based on the mlb.com list. Very very thin with infielders. Who replaces Bregman? Joe Perez? Hensley? If you can't afford to extend Bregman you certainly won't be able to replace his production via free agency, and especially if you give Tucker 300 million plus... It's a little easier to let Correa walk when you have a Pena knocking on the door. There isn't a Pena for 3rd base, but there are a bunch of outfielders that could be productive.
He was 4th in the league in OPS last season behind Judge, Yordan, and Goldschmidt. Consensus best 2B in the league. He's getting closer to 30 million a year if it's a short term extension.
I would trade ****er today if you could get the Juan Soto package. You might be able to. You’d have 3 years of Tucker compared to 2.5 years of Soto, and based upon their arb numbers you would only owe Tucker like 33 or 35M in all likelihood, while Soto, as a super 2, was going to be much further along salary wise. It would take a top 10 type prospect, a top 50 type prospect, a top 100 type prospect and maybe a lotto ticket or two. One of those would have to be a catcher. Then your OF is Chas, Yordan/Brantley and Meyers I guess, with Leon, Gilbert and a couple other guys on deck. I’d also need to see extensions for Abreu and Brown if at all possible. Basically the idea would be one step back (and roll the dice) when we are already pretty much guaranteed playoff team to solidify contention status for the rest of the decade. We don’t need a ton to go right for that to happen but we probably either need an all star Tucker (and a pretty good Bregman) extended through the end of the decade or we need the pieces they could bring if traded with multiple years of club control left. If they leave for draft picks like Correa that does very very very little to extend our run.
And then there’s this as well. Which is perfectly reasonable and rational way to approach the next 3 years.
My number for Bregman was always 5/150. That seems fair to me if you offer it NOW ( or two years from now if he has a couple big seasons. I might go 6/180 or 7/200 again now) but to offer him 7/210 now seems to me to be FA type pricing 2 years before he’s earned FA. Seems like there’s no discount to the Astros but who knows. I think the next offseason with 1 year to go after Machado opts out and gets his new deal will be instructive on what his market value is. Great post.
Welp- with Machado now signing an 11/350 at 31 years old that leads me to believe that Bregman won’t possibly accept less than 7/200 and will probably be looking for something more like 10/275 or something. I’d probably do that as the new cost of doing business and figure it helps keep me in contention until the end of Brown/Whitley/Peña/Alvarez era and I’d be left with 4/110 in dead money for a team I’m probably looking to tear down and rebuild again, but man- an extra 100M on a contract now as the cost of doing business seems insane in a world where RSN’s are going bankrupt.
Man, San Diego is paying Machado through his age 41 season. You have to account for a team possibly misreading the market, but to be be this aggressive with an offer they had to be confident something in this ballpark would have came from somewhere else in free agency. If we're talking Bregman and Tucker extensions, all the big deals around the league suggest 200 and 300 million respectively are the floors right now. The cost of doing business is crazy, so theres no reason to think an early extension is even feasible in this market.
I can't wait to see a retrospective analysis after interest rates reduce the values of the cash flow and lost RSNs change the income projections.
Yeah. This is an interesting thought though- I wonder if it makes a 22 or 23 year old star just up more likely to take a 9/110M type offer. They might figure- hey- I can guarantee generational money for me and mine and still take a bit at the apple with a 10/350M contract when I hit FA at 31 or 32. That might be interesting. I sort of doubt it- but I might consider that if I was a young guy just up from the minors with star written all over me. Pena is too old probably for that thinking to work. I don't see how you can extend him right now or ever. Pitchers should still want to extend b/c arm injury can be so dicey and you only get one career- but for position players where career ending injury is really really rare (and so is sudden, spontaneous suckage) signing an extension deal really needs to happen soon. I think the Padres (especially with the RSN's going BK) have just fundamentally misread the market. If MLB has to distribute carriage through their site and streaming and baseball becomes a subscription model almost every team is going to take a huge economic hickey. I cant imagine the price point on an Astros sub being more than $100.00 a year for an individual team. How many people they think going to pay that on top of their other cable bills and subscription services? 40K? 50k? 100K? There are a shitload of Astros fans I know that are pretty serious about being Astros fans that won't switch to Direct TV to get them. Will they do a separate $100 a year bill? Maybe? But I sort of don't think so. So, lets say you get 100k people to pay you $100.00 a year. That's all of 10M And that's before you even get into cost to produce the game. Can they get a million people around Houston to pay them $100 a year or 10 a month or something? I'm highly skeptical. Even if they could you are talking what 100M in gross. Take out all the production costs (which teams don't currently pay and what do you have left? I don't know. But I suspect those salaries and carmeras and tech's and engineers and guys working in the truck add up to a decent amount of money. Team distributing itself (essentially through MLB) would get to keep commercial costs. Typically that runs on local TV somewhere around $5-10 per 1,000 viewers. Call it 100k views during a normal game and that makes every 30 second commercial worth about $500.00 per spot. Figure on about 40 or 50 available spots during the game plus pre and post game and you are talking about something like $50,000 per game game. So- $10M or so in commercial costs? My suspicion is that MLB wouldn't even cover production costs with the advertising, but lets say they did- that makes it something like needing 700,000 paid subscribers to make up for the $70M they are currently getting from AT&T sports net. Good luck. I don't see that happening. And the Astros are at the top of the success cycle. How manly people in Pittsburg want to fork out any money to watch on a sub service? Yeah- this seems like a seismic shock that is going to make every deal passed out this winter look crazy. At the end of the day these guys are probably smarter than me- or at least they know more and have already identified the greater fool that's going to pay them for linear distribution and the sub is all add on and they will be ok. But, in the world where people cord cut every content producer is going to get hammered (and there's going to be a lot less content) as everything becomes niche like. Where are my assumptions wrong? Where do the numbers need to be tightened up on revenue in or cost out? This is all very preliminary back of the envelope math and hell- I'm open to the idea I could be off by a factor of 2 or 3
If 10+ years at $275M+ is the norm for 30 year olds...Astros about to be the new Rays with Crane's tendencies. But like someone else said, if it is indeed the new norm, young starts might be more likely to lock themselves up for arb + 2 FA years knowing they can still get mega contracts in their 30s
All I know is money spent now will be cheaper than money spent 2-3 years from now. The streaming contracts are going to lead to a major influx of growing cash for all teams. Contracts are going to continue to be plentiful both in years and total amounts.
The next wave of streaming deals are likely to be sold on a mass, not individual, scale. MLB will gravitate more towards an NFL-type media rights model vs letting the teams individually negotiate. That has led to the biggest economic disparities as is. Teams abandoning the RSN model and getting in early will actually reap a ton of future value while some old network holdovers continue to assess the long term viability. The number of MLB.TV and MLB extra inning subscribers is already a fair starting point for negotiations with a larger streaming service. YouTube just shelled out a boat load for Sunday Ticket based solely on DirectTV subscribers alone, and in general the streaming companies are well set up to make competitive offers for all sports going forward. no sports team is going to rely on simply a payment per subscriber model. They’re going to seek and get guarantees. The medium just changes.
That will play out to be a HORRIBLE contract for the Padres and I bet they consider buying him out before the end of it. Players like Machado will quit the game and become lax as time goes on.
Or by the time Machado is at the end of his contract, teams will be extending players for 10 years 500 million, making the 30 million he’s making in his age 41 season look much less risky?
Does the TV situation freeze Astros until a solution is presented? How much money do Astros lose with the TV deal? Astros were getting 70 million a year. Contract ended in 2032.
