Nelson Cruz is 40...

[DrungoHazewood]

9 hours ago, Uli2001 said:

At the end of the day, the message is "we don't believe you have more than three productive years in you." They let him walk. Cruz is too classy to go the media complain.

As a general rule of thumb it's completely reasonable to assume that a 34-year-old baseball player doesn't have more than three productive years left.  It's reasonable to assume he doesn't have two.  In almost 150 years there have been more than 20,000 major league players, and 118 of them have had at least a 2-win (i.e. average regular) season at 37.

Of those 118 almost half (55) are in the Hall of Fame or still on the ballot; at 34 Cruz had about a 1% chance at the Hall.  And about 40 of them had their season from 1990-2010 and may have had some fountain of youth help.

Through his season in Baltimore where he turned 34 he'd had four 2-win seasons in his entire career.  Betting that he'd match or out-do that from 34-on is nonsense.

[DrungoHazewood]

9 hours ago, Uli2001 said:

I like fan banter too, but come on, that was an awful call by the Orioles. You may say that hindsight is 20/20, but it was awful and you know it. It was the first of a series of bad calls following their peak in 2014. It was downhill from there.

Any GM who'd sign Cruz to that deal at that age made a bad decision in my book.  Unless he has a budget where $15M a year or $65M total just doesn't matter.