Mark Berman: Astros offering Carlos Correa a 5 year/160 million dollar contract

Trout has not been healthy...

 

He played 134 games in 2019 and 53 last year (out of 60). This year was obviously terrible - but when he's healthy, he's still the best player in baseball. Do you think the Angels have any regrets about that contract? If they decided tomorrow to trade him, do you think they'd have any trouble moving him?

 

Even the Rangers had to throw money to the Yankees for Arod...

 

The Rangers also got back a club controlled superstar (or so everyone thought) in that deal (Soriano). In their deal with Boston that fell through, they were going to get Manny Ramirez. So it's not like it was just a pure "please take this contract off my hands" salary dump - they were getting value back.

 

Depends on if they want anything of real value for him, there are only a handful of teams who could take that contract on.

 

His contract is not really much different than the other top contracts out there - about $35MM/yr for one of the the best players in the history of baseball at 29 years old. He's finished top-2 in the MVP vote 7 times - he even won the MVP in the year he played 130 games. If the trade was "You get Trout; we get nothing", all 29 other teams would take that in a heartbeat, in my opinion - including the A's, Rays, Marlins, any rebuilding team, etc. They'd trade whoever they had to in order to manage their payroll costs. He's the one $30MM+ player that's actually underpaid, possibly by a large margin.

 

Its time that people re-calibrate their sticker shock when it comes to contract amounts. 10 years is not an albatross. 35-40 million/year is the current star rate and will only continue to go up.

For some reason people still get perturbed at baseball salaries… when in fact football and basketball have seen much higher escalations for their stars.

Is it simply because there’s more of an even playing field in that all NFL/NBA teams can afford huge deals?

 

The point remains there are only a small number of teams that could take that contract.

 

Well there's a distinction between contract amounts and contract years.

Seems like most 10 year contracts, that I can think of, have turned into albatrosses.

 

As has been repeatedly shown here, that's not actually true.

 

Would it sound better to you if I called it a 7 year contract with deferred payments and we get to have him play for free for an additional 3 years?

Greinke is getting paid 12.5 million per year for the next 5 years and he won't even play for us.

 

That implies that it’s solely the contract that is holding the team back from competing or was the cause of the eventual failure.

That won’t be the case here. Whoever is on this team in 10 years is virtually assured to not have a core as special as the one they currently have.

 

Depends. It's not just the value of the contract vs. player performance but the opportunity costs of committing a substantial portion of your payroll budget.

 

Crane feels it’s completely worth it to add a 35 million dollar/year salary to a current core that has 2 other guys set to make 30 million+ a year along with Verlander that he commited $50 million over the next 2 years.

He clearly doesn’t have a problem spending when the team is expected to win. The main issue with no long term deals is that there’s a good chance the team will not be as close of a contender and having a big contract around that time can possibly delay the rebuild.

The people worried about a long Correa deal aren’t really thinking about that rebuild. They’re still expecting to be a year-in/year-out contender which while always great to remain optimistic, just isn’t all that realistic to expect this team to have a near 20 year window of contention.

 

This is the drum I keep beating. The competitive window will end. When it does correa can either be the elder statesman type for the new group of rookies or you can trade him if he has any value or cut him if he doesn’t. But that money just won’t matter when you are rebuilding- as every rebuilding team that slashes its payroll to 20 or 30 million has shown. Do I care if Crane is paying $50 million to suck instead of $20 million to suck in 2029 if it means a World Series title or just and extra pennant or two right now? Hell **** no. I guess there’s some argument that the team will be competitive for 20 years without needing a reset in that time but that’s happened what- 2 times in the history of baseball ever? And one of them was with the Yanks of the depression when baseball was different and the other was with the Braves if the 90’s and 2000’s who had 1 World Series win. Would the Braves fans have traded those last couple years where they won 92 games and were an afterthought for winning it all for a couple more title in the 90’s with their big 3 rotation? I’d guess so. I certainly would if I was them.

 

Outside of Pujols and Cano, what 10-yr contracts turned into albatrosses?

 

ARods second deal/extension with the Yanks. Which was stupid and happened when he was well into his 30’s. but his first deal that he signed with the Rangers was a ridiculously awesome value that if anyone would regret it shows that they are bad at math/understanding basic value in baseball.
he was awesome for most of that deal and when he was not awesome he was still incredibly good.

 

Not technically a 10 year deal, but the Cabrera extension was a disaster for the Tigers. A Rods second super contract was also a disaster, but because it was the Yankees nobody noticed. There hasn't been many 250 million type deals until recently. The only player that you can say clearly lived up to his contract was A-rods first deal, Pujols,Cano,Cabrera and A-rod 2 were disasters. Votto has been up and down, and still has a few potentially terrible years left (maybe not)

Ultimately if you are paying Correa you are doing so to win a title in the next few seasons, and if you do nothing else will matter. And in Correas defense none of those past mega deals were as young as Correa, save for A-Rod 1, which worked out.

Not enough evidence on the recent crop of mega deals.

 

I wouldn't consider Arod a success. Rangers couldn't field a good team with that albtoross of a contract. Yankees could, but not many have pockets that deep.

 

Then you would be completely and totally wrong.
In the 10th year of ARods original 20 year deal he put up 4 WAR and was 15th in MVP voting. That was by far his worst year. He had a 10 WAR season with the Rangers and multiple 7 and 8 WAR seasons and was MVP and awesome. that money was t the reason they couldn’t compete, they couldn’t compete because the team outside of him sucked and they did a shitty job of identifying and developing players outside of him.
to say that deal was anything other than a rousing success in that first 10 year time period is absurd. he never had a year where he was t worth what he paid and he racked up
Ore surplus value than any free agent other than maybe Barry Bonds ever in the history of the FA era.
It’s a bad take here. Go look at his stats- he was amazing. I guess you could argue that the same organization that was so shitty at spending the rest of their money would have smartly spent his money which is a dubious in the extreme proposition.