Wednesday Afternoon Frappuccino
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Mo' Dawg called for our guesstimations, as to the market trend for Granderson.
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POTD
Here is that four-part series on the lad. The Exec Sum is that Granderson:
- Has chosen to become a hacker -- a .240 hitter with 35-40 homers (cf Carlos Quentin, Chris Davis, Edwin Encarnacion, now Josh Hamilton)
- Is a legit 175-190 PX guy (very elite)
- Plays mediocre-to-dubious CF ... which would be okay with Taijuan and K-Pax in there
- Gives you a "hard" 3.0 to 4.0 WAR (has done it for 160 games, in batter's box, in postseason, etc)
- Scores a lot of runs too
The M's have indicated that they want two (2) frontline power hitters. If Granderson were the second, he would certainly qualify as such. And he'd be doing it from CF.
He's not AS good a player as his 40-homer seasons suggest, but he's not to be underestimated. He changes the scoreboard, both at the front end and back end, and he plays in the middle of the field.
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Market Rate
MLBTradeRumors guessed 3 x $15M for his next contract.
Fangraphs 'crowdsourcing' guessed 4 x $14M as the contract that Granderson would sign -- but as with every free agent on their list, readers said that (in real life) they would cap their offer for less, at fewer years. This reflects the fact that we baseball fans do not feel that free agents are worth the deals they get.
The Yankees and Mets (!) are supposedly in a mild rivalry for his services right now. We suppose you can take it from there, as far as the possibility of a 3 x $11M type deal popping up.
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Back-Loaded Contracts
If you just joined us, MLB teams like to UNDERpay free agents at the beginning of their contracts, and OVERpay them at the end. In a happy coincidence, players also like these arrangements. (How many lear jets do you need in 2014?)
Here is an article in which even a noted financial tight-purse does /cosign on the idea of contracts with 'crazy' overpays at the end of them. He demonstrates that if you don't like the idea of 9 x $25M for Robinson Cano, then you'd better be prepared to pay 5 x $35M instead. And why wouldn't you want the four extra free years? As well as the ability to defer dollars and pay them when they're deflated?
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Whenever a player signs one of these mega contracts, a significant part of the reaction is that the deal is crazy because of how overpaid the player is going to be at the end of the deal. That is usually a true statement, but it is far too narrow of a way of viewing contracts. If teams were primarily interested in avoiding having dead money on the books, then the average salary of the highest paid players in the game would be something like $10 million per year higher than it is now.
That is not the choice that teams and players have made. Both sides have agreed that they would rather transfer those up-front costs to the back end of the deal, giving the player security of knowing where he’ll spend most of the rest of his career, while deferring a portion of the cost of carrying a star player to nearly a decade from now. ...
Any team who trades for David Price this winter is going to be giving up players who project to have significant value from 2016-2020ish, and in acquiring Price, they’ll be getting zero expected production from him in those years, barring a very expensive contract extension before he reaches free agency. Even with an extension, the cost of buying out free agency is going to be so high that they’ll be receiving little surplus value in those years. Meanwhile, the prospects they’ve traded away will have to be replaced with future spending. Acquiring Price for prospects is, at the end of the day, not that different from signing a a player to a six or seven year contract when you only expect him to perform for two of those six or seven years.
Yet this kind of borrowing from the future is widely accepted as a roster building technique. Trading prospects for veterans is what contending teams do, and is considered part of the value of having a strong farm system in the first place. Making the same kind of decision, only substituting in future cash instead of future cost controlled players, often leads to derision and scorn.
... I would suggest, however, that we view both types of moves as the same decision, and not immediately reject the value of deferring a premium free agent’s cost into years 7-10 simply because the contract is going to end poorly. It’s going to end poorly because, when these deals are done right, they provide a huge amount of value at the beginning of the contract, far and above what a player is actually worth based on his production.
Declaring that any contract a bad contract if it ends with multiple years of low performance-to-salary ratios is simply incomplete analysis.
Don’t want to give Robinson Cano a nine year deal? That’s fine, and perhaps even rational. ...
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LH vs RH bats issue
Also see this shtick.
Or not.
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Dr's R/X
Granderson's Established Level of Performance, in my opinion, is at the 3.0 - 4.0 WAR level, which means $15-20M would be an "average" market rate for his skills. (NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH a "correct" market pay for his skills in every scenario.)
Let that sink in for a moment. To pay $15-20M to Granderson, over the next couple of years, would be like paying $3.25 for gasoline. It's simply the "fair" price for gas, if you in fact want to use gasoline. If you go to Nordstrom and want to buy a Loro Piana cashmere trenchcoat off the rack, it's $700. If you want to go out and bid on a proven star like Curtis Granderson, it's $15-20M for one.
Granderson is subject to age decline, as are almost all FA's, but the 3 (max 4) year situation basically leaves that a non-issue. Supposing he is worth $20M in 2014, and then $15M in 2015, and then $10M in 2016, and then $5M in 2017, that's fine.
As James reminds us, offseasons are more about opportunity than preferences. It's almost more an issue of whether we happen into Granderson, than whether we prefer him. If we do, and he's one of two bats in, that is basically a WIN for the offseason. If you are being binary -- I/O -- then Granderson and (Cruz?) is going to (theoretically) do what you need it to do - provide the backup your attempted 115 ERA+ pitching staff.
Granderson is -- per the fans' guesses, at least -- a quite reasonably-priced and fairly low-risk free agent. The question is really whether you want him.
Beltran vs Cruz vs Granderson vs a lot of these guys, it's really a matter of taste, at least more so than most winters. But then that's where our lead image came in :- )
BABVA,
Dr D