2020-21 Baseball Offseason Thread

I'm assuming there's a player option in there somewhere, maybe after year 7?

 

Think of the possibilities for snowbirds: Not going to a Jays game in the afternoon in Dunedin and not hanging around to not watch the Raptors in St. Petersburg at night.

 

Works out to about $24.3 million per season. If he's as good as he's looked so far, it'll be a good deal for them. That's about the going rate for an elite superstar (he'll be the 12th-highest paid position player in 2021), and in seven or eight years once the bar has been reset a few times by the likes of Mike Trout and others, it might even be a bargain.
If he gets hurt or severely underperforms ... yikes. That could end up being an A-Rod/Yankees kind of deal.

 

Wins the Internet.

 

A's Murphy recovering from collapsed lung, Montas out with COVID

I find myself very curious how Oakland catcher Sean Murphy ended up with a collapsed long, but happy to hear his prognosis is good.

 

It’s tough to judge this deal until you find out what outs there are.

 

A-Rod with the Yankees: 12 years, 2 MVPs, 136 OPS+, 351 homers, 1,096 RBI, a .283 / .378 / .523 slash line for ages 28-40 and that's with a terrible year at age 40 and two-thirds of the season with a hip injury at age 37.

There was nothing wrong with that contract.

 

How was it a bad deal for the Yankees?

 

He won the two MVPs when he was still under the 10-year contract from the Rangers. He had a monster season in 2007 and then opted out of his old deal and signed a new 10-year, $275 million contract that offseason that carried him through the end of his career.
He hit 54 home runs in 2007 and then never hit even 40 again. He was still very good from 2008-10, but started a precipitous decline in 2011. In the last six years of his career he hit a total of 83 home runs (33 of them during a bounce-back season in 2015), only played more than 122 games once, sat out an entire season because of the PED scandal and most of two others because of injuries. By 2013 he was aging and untradeable while making $20 million-plus per season. His contract was widely viewed as an anchor even for the Yankees.
Albert Pujols might have supplanted him as the brown standard of bad long-term baseball contracts, but A-Rod held the title for a good while.

 

And then they did the same thing with Sabathia. Frustrating. When these stars opt out of these contracts you say thank you and run, They're voluntarily turning their Pujols/Stanton contracts into Halladay/Bauer contracts. The team should throw a parade and run.

 

With some of these, I think they hope for five great years, two or three productive ones, and then hopefully the player retires either before they hit the wall or with only one or two bad seasons. For all the crap he's gotten about declining skills, Pujols is actually the model of what teams are hoping for with those deals. He's not the $29 million a year player he once was, but he's at least remained reasonably productive in his late 30s.

 

word on the street is that the chicago bears have reached out to tebow and are close to a deal