I can’t understand why ANY team would sign someone to a 10 year contract. I can’t remember a player who signed that long of a deal and was a high performer for most of it. I’m not saying that players haven’t been good for 10 years, just that I’ve never seen a player sign that long of a deal and THEN continue to be a high performer. I’m thinking of people like Haynesworth, ARod, Pujols, Josh Hamilton etc… Cubs waited for what seemed like an eternity to get out from under Soriano and Zambrano.
Why on earth would a team sign away so much of a its future on a star player who has probably already peaked? Hasn’t it been proven time and time again that this never works out for the gaining team?
That’s fair, I think 7 years is the absolute ceiling that you can depend on a star player with any certainty, and if they start sucking ass you only have a few years of that before you are done with them. That’s why I set the bar at 8 years. I realize this limits things to mostly baseball players though.
True. He was heading towards his peak though. Cano feels like they are paying him big money for what he already did, not for what he can do for them for 10 years.
I don’t know much about hockey though but weren’t super long term contracts pretty normal in hockey in the old days?
Again, 7 years and not 8, but Carlos Beltran’s mega-deal worked out swell for the Mets. They got 6.6 years of elite play in Center Field (at the plate, in the field, and on the basepaths), and then they sold the last couple months of his deal to San Fran for Zach Wheeler. (The Mets had to pick up 100% of the remaining salary, but the Giants got no draft pick compensation when Beltran left in free agency and surely regret the trade now.)
There have been some. Arod’s first contract was fine. Manny’s was mostly good. Jeter’s worked out very nicely. You have to keep in mind though that you can’t judge a contract by the value in the back years. The mariners don’t think Cano will be 24 million dollar player in 2020. What they are hoping is the surplus value in the next few years makes up for the inevitable decline.
Because that’s what it takes to get the player in the current marketplace. I understand that practically nobody plays up to these deals, but… revenue for baseball teams has been going up and up and up, which is why contracts have done the same. The increased revenue makes it easier for them to afford a contract where a star player is overpaid in his declining years. The Mariners are at the start of a big new TV contract, just like the Angels around the time they signed Pujols. Further, the Mariners have stunk for an extended period of time and they’re hemorrhaging fans, so they needed to make a splash. Cano won’t earn the back end of this contract on the field, but he could be worth it for them in other ways- jersey sales, ticket sales, TV network subscriptions, and so on. These contracts don’t make sense in baseball terms; it’s WAAAAAY better to sign a young player to a long-term deal than to give a big-money deal to a star player who is at his peak and will decline long before the deal ends. But there’s more going on here than ‘how good will this guy be in nine years?’
I agree that the basic gist to get enough surplus value out of Cano in the first half of the contract to make up for the albatross this thing is going to be in its last few years. I think the Mariners are also really hoping to get enough value from Cano, Felix, and some subset of their young players in 2015/2016 to get people like me back to Safeco for a few games a year. I love baseball, but I can’t remember the last year I went to more than one Mariners game in a season - or gave a shit about them.