Brown is exercising the art of committing to nothing while saying nice things generally. We want you to retire here (if we can work out a satisfactory deal.) The player hears we want you to retire here and his agent hears if we can work out a deal. It's a great skill to have. Those without this skill tend to play things close to the vest and limit communication so they are not misunderstood. Not doing this leads to termination (Click).[/QUOTE]
Wanting them to retire and paying them a bunch of money during their final years are two different things. Altuve will be an Astro until he is no longer a plus hitter. At some point in the next 5 years, he will move to DH assuming Alvarez can still play left field. I'm also assuming Altuve will retire when he isn't a plus hitter anymore.
I do worry about Altuve. You can look no further than his countryman and friend Miguel Cabrera to see that an all-bat player can fall off a cliff pretty quick in his mid 30s. Altuve can not play any other position other than 2B and a significant part of his offensive game depends on speed. Just small downgrades to his speed and power could be catastrophic to his overall value. Cabrera was extremely good in his age 33 season, then was below replacement level at age 34 and has been terrible ever since. I would really not want an extension for Altuve to go much past his age 36 season unless it was at an extremely low salary for those additional years. A 5 year deal replacing his current deal would take him thru his age 37 season and the odds are that beyond that point he will no longer be a viable player outside of a part time player playing for nostalgia and clubhouse influence. Something like $140M/5yrs plus 3 $25M team/vesting options with minimal buyouts seems about the most I would expect Houston to offer. That gives him a chance to play until he’s 40, pays him fairly for 3 additional years, ensures he retires an Astro, but doesn’t carry enough weight to cripple the franchise.
That last part is the reality that fans like horn don’t understand. Every financial decision made affects decisions that will have to be made in the future. Crane has done a fantastic job balancing that. There are always “all in” type of moves that could be made, and if we were sitting here with zero titles through this period I might be more inclined to get on board with an all in right now move. Reality is he is keeping us as a top 2-3 favorite for what looks like it will be at least a decade.
I understand the budget of baseball as well as anyone and better than most. I disagree with how the Astros have decided to apportion it in many cases (not spending to the tax line- lots of 4-9M deals for mediocre pitchers) while stars get away over trivial amounts of money (Springer at 25M a year being allowed to walk was absurd- I know everyone said he didn't want to be here but we didn't even try). I don't think most fans realize how great a job the last FO did in bringing in an absurd amount of talent to the organization. That is about up (Brown and maybe Whitley) and we will see if the new guy gets it. I feel a lot better about him than I did Click or Bagwell/Ausmus/Jackson or whatever other nonsense could have been in store for us.
The cap doesn't end at the start of the season. If there is no cap space, you can't make mid season adjustments without going over. The worst outcome is being just a little bit over because it's still counts toward future penalties.
I have wondered what a deep dive analysis would show about when baseball players actually peak. I think it could be possible that traditional player development styles resulted in bringing up players more slowly than ideal. Athletically I think guys probably peak in the 24-27 range but baseball production peak tends to lag that; if that’s just because teams are hesitant to let guys skip a level then it might be a market inefficiency to fast track players you think are core pieces. As always, I am extremely interested to see the minor league roster assignments.
I’m well aware. Guess what- if you need room you can make room. We ended up about 27 cents below the line one year. We can move guys on the 40 that aren’t part of our best 16 or 18 if it’s for a difference maker. Also- the penalties at the first level are merely financial. If we end up 1M over and that costs us 1.25M with the tax I don’t really give a ****.
I'm concerned with year 2 when we have higher penalties for being a repeat offender rather than a first time offender. That's where it really multiplies. I really don't care about a 250k penalty either, but i do care if year 2 penalties cost us 10s of millions because of new contracts.
The history of the game has shown us that the majority of the truly special talents force their way to the top relatively early… age 21-22. Charlie Pallilo has a fairly good take on this with deep dive analysis.
Yep. If you are just being a cold blooded ******* the Correas of the world come up at 21 or 22 (and you ought to offer them a 10 year contract btw) and the Colin McHughs of the world come up at 26 or 27 and you have the entirety of their primes and no offer of FA extensions or the like.
We shall see if Wander and Julian are going to be confirming this new trend/strategy… or will have some teams re-thinking it.
Yeah/ it’s going to be really fascinating. I actually line the idea of a guy coming up at 22, looking like a super star and the team and he agreeing that he will play for them for life for between 300 and 500M. That’s a ton of money for the player but a discount for the team for sure on a HOF type career. Fans get to ride with a player for life. It’s awesome. It’s what I wanted us to do with Correa, Springer, Altuve and Bregman. 300M/15 X 4 is only 80M a year. You can afford that for 4 cornerstone players. Right now Altuve, Bregman are at like 58 themselves and our payroll has 22M in slack. Now- you couldn’t have done that for Altuve bc you had no idea he’d be a superstar, but you could have offered those contracts in year 1 to Correa and Bregman and probably made that happen.
And if you're paying all that extra money to those guys unnecessarily in 2017, the Astros likely don't sign McCann or Beltran or trade for JV, and the Astros probably don't win the World Series. They aren't spending $200MM on a team that didn't even make the playoffs the previous year. Good chance they don't take risks on Reddick or Brantley or Greinke either.
I just get the image of Dana Brown walking around to every prospect "so you gonna start winning or be a b**ch"
Not necessarily. They don’t pay those contracts out at an even rate and we were nowhere near the alt threshold. If it’s dollars expended it didn’t need to be different at all. And let’s just say not signing Reddick would have been a feature and not a bug for me. Do you not remember how horrible he was in the 2017 playoffs and then him being totally washed the last 2 years of his career? Mccann wasn’t exactly great either. If you are going to tell me it wasn’t worth having our core 4 together bc we’d have missed out on the chance to employ a washed Reddick and mostly washed McCann I’m going to shrug and laugh. Beltran was lighting money on fire and brought over the cheating to us. Let’s just say the case for locking up our 4 gets better and better the more I think about it.