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Miguel Cabrera new deal gets him 30m a year

Greg

By Greg
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Stotle Hangout Grand Counsel

Stotle

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21-year-old position player with an established baseline of 9 wins a year is about as good a place to start as any sports star has ever had.

Agreed. If you are planning on keeping him long term, you do this. If the deal goes well over the next four years they will probably talk re-extension.

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33rdst All-Star

33rdst

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Good for Cabrera. Good for Tiger fans. Good for Ilitch. For me it seems like a bit of overkill. Give me the Rays approach or the A's approach, or perhaps the future approach of the Orioles. In the end it's about winning. Nothing is guaranteed in baseball. I like long shoots that make it.

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Frobby Hangout Grand Counsel

Frobby

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Dave Cameron weighs in:

Point: This contract is a ridiculous overpay.

The point of a pre-free agent extension is that a team gets a discount in exchange for taking away the player's risk of injury before he gets a chance to land a big contract in free agency. By giving Cabrera the equivalent of 10/$292M when he was two years away from free agency, the Tigers are implicitly arguing that his open market value this winter would have been something more along the lines of $325 to $350 million.

There's no reasonable justification for that valuation, not when Robinson Cano topped at $240 million and only had a single bidder over $175M. One can rationally prefer Cabrera to Cano, but there?s no way that Cabrera is 30% to 40% more valuable. Or, to put things into the Tigers own valuation formula, there's no reasonable argument that Cabrera is twice as valuable as Max Scherzer, even though their final offer to him was less than half of what they have now committed to Cabrera. If the Tigers are lucky, they'll end up paying something like $9 million per win over the life of Cabrera's deal, and that's including the two years that they already had under control. If they really wanted to throw this kind of money around, they simply could have done better than signing up for Cabrera's entire decline phase.

Counter Point: There isn't one. This deal is a ridiculous overpay.

I understand why the Tigers wanted to keep Miguel Cabrera around for the rest of his career. He's going to go into the Hall of Fame as a Tiger, and he'll be remembered as one of the greatest players to ever wear the Detroit uniform. It's hard to let those guys leave. The Cardinals are pretty happy they let Albert Pujols go, though, and in a few years, the Tigers will wish they had let Cabrera go too.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/miguel-cabreras-terrible-and-understandable-contract/

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Stotle Hangout Grand Counsel

Stotle

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If $30 million only buys you 4.0 rWAR on the open market in a few years, I think that'll be my cue to say "---- it, let's go bowling."

That would be a quick escalation. But I'm not sure why we would think salaries won't be at $8MM/win on the open market by the time the contract expires. and it's probably going to be at $6 MM/win in the next year or two.

Average MLB salaries have increased around 40% in the last ten years.

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DrungoHazewood Hangout Grand Counsel

DrungoHazewood

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I think he may have missed on a couple points. First, he doesn't take inflation into account. If, over the life of the contract, a win is more like $7M then this is paying for 41 wins. The numbers I came up with the other day said 8 of 24 guys with Cabrera-like careers through 30 were worth 40+ wins from 31-on. He says the Tigers will pay $9M per win if they're lucky - but that's only 32 wins. If they're lucky they'll pay for 41 wins at $7M or so per, which is not unreasonable at all.

So, is it a "ridiculous overpay" to sign your top player to a contract with a 1-in-3 chance of being fiscally reasonable, when there's about a 90% chance you'll be dead before the contract is over?

If the O's just signed Cabrera to this deal I'd be very nervous it would lead them down an ugly path pretty quickly. But the Tigers, with a far higher payroll ceiling and an owner who just doesn't care how much money he dies with? Sure, why not? I think Cabrera is the next Frank Thomas, in his 30s interspersing good years with years where he OPS's .680 in 92 PAs. But the good years might bring a trophy.

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Stotle Hangout Grand Counsel

Stotle

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I think he may have missed on a couple points. First, he doesn't take inflation into account. If, over the life of the contract, a win is more like $7M then this is paying for 41 wins. The numbers I came up with the other day said 8 of 24 guys with Cabrera-like careers through 30 were worth 40+ wins from 31-on. He says the Tigers will pay $9M per win if they're lucky - but that's only 32 wins. If they're lucky they'll pay for 41 wins at $7M or so per, which is not unreasonable at all.

So, is it a "ridiculous overpay" to sign your top player to a contract with a 1-in-3 chance of being fiscally reasonable, when there's about a 90% chance you'll be dead before the contract is over?

If the O's just signed Cabrera to this deal I'd be very nervous it would lead them down an ugly path pretty quickly. But the Tigers, with a far higher payroll ceiling and an owner who just doesn't care how much money he dies with? Sure, why not? I think Cabrera is the next Frank Thomas, in his 30s interspersing good years with years where he OPS's .680 in 92 PAs. But the good years might bring a trophy.

I enjoy when intellectual writers like Cameron/Law frame a situation as if front offices don't understand projection models and WAR.

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El Gordo Hangout Grand Counsel

El Gordo

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It really seems like the os not resigning/extending Davis is your main platform point around here.

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No, I wouldn't say I have a main platform point. But anybody who isn't smoking something should be able to see that the combination of Davis, Boras, and the MFY/SUX need for a 1B in 2016, means no extension for the O's So perhaps my main platform, besides discouraging moronic posts, is discouraging posters who can't put down the pipe
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sneaky flute Rookie

sneaky flute

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The Tigers have made some peculiar moves the last couple of years and I thought they were done with these types of contracts. Scherzer recently rejected a 6-year, 144-million dollar contract (dummy).

They essentially played chess with themselves in this negotiation as no other team was going to give Cabrera 30 million a year.

People assumed the Fister trade was done for financial trade so that move is even more puzzling in light of recent events.

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El Gordo Hangout Grand Counsel

El Gordo

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Surprised a smart guy like Cameron can't think up a counter-point. Law too. Sensationalism sells!
Here's a counter argument. What could you reasonable expect MCab to produce over the next 10 years.? Say 13 WAR the next two years ? Then using Ortiz as a comp, as a DH MCab would be worth at least 4 WAR, and still playing 1B putting up Ortiz numbers, at least 5 WAR. So lets say he plays 4 more years after 2016 at 1B, for 20 WAR total and 4 years as a DH for 16 WAR. Round it off to 50 WAR total because MCab is a better hitter than Ortiz, and you have 300 M, so about what the Tigers are paying. But if you want to sign the best hitter in the game to a long term contract you are going to have to overpay, so the Tiger aren't really doing all that badly here. The question I would have is, given their window to contend, is this expense really in the best interests of the team's future?
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