Elias on contract extensions

[eddie83]

30 minutes ago, DirtyBird said:

This makes no sense. Of course Elias & the baseball operations team would have some say in who gets extended, and who shouldn't. Rubenstein has control of the payroll budget Elias would need to work within, and final say on the extension and it's value.

I'd assume Elias wouldn't want to extend Gunnar for a price that wouldn't allow for a winning roster to be built around him.

Any GM in baseball would want to build around Gunnar. Payroll comes down to the owner. 
 

Of course a GM would have a say. Young superstars like Gunnar don’t come around that often. 

[interloper]

Frankly we have more important things to worry about. If you can get it done great, but the team needs like 4 major pieces this offseason. 

[DirtyBird]

12 minutes ago, interloper said:

Frankly we have more important things to worry about. If you can get it done great, but the team needs like 4 major pieces this offseason. 

But buying out pre-arbitration year is what gives Gunnar the most incentive  to sign an extension. If it were to get done, it would pretty much need to be this offseason.

[Warehouse]

1 hour ago, DirtyBird said:

But buying out pre-arbitration year is what gives Gunnar the most incentive  to sign an extension. If it were to get done, it would pretty much need to be this offseason.

Boras has been an MLB agent for 41 years and has done exactly 1 pre-arb extension (or “‘snuff contracts” as he calls them) buying out exactly 1 pre-arb year.  Extending Gunnar and Westburg would quadruple the number of pre-arb years his players have been bought out of.

Maybe Boras will have a change of heart? Maybe Gunnar and Westburg will go against his advice despite picking him as their agent?

[BRobinsonfan]

18 hours ago, SteveA said:

Double hedge:

1) "responsible attempt" 

2) IF it is in the best interests of building the team

Both obviously true and impossible to find fault with as stated, but both also obviously deliberately inserted in the sentence as hedges to explain, after the fact, why we failed to extend any of our younger players beyond their original team control period.   

Either there are stronger fiscal restraints still in place than people would like to believe, or else Elias really doesn't believe extending team talent and buying free agent years is the way to go, even though lots of the other cool kids have been doing it, including Houston with Altuve, Tampa, Cleveland, Philly, and other franchises.

I say this as a hedge as well:  

"To examine ways..."  

In other words "we examined ways it could be done but in the end didn't execute on any of those ways."  

[theobird]

What would you like the guy to say? “nope, we have learned from the Rangers and now the Tigers that the key to all of this is to get hot late and get lucky. So, we’re just gonna run it back and hope we hit the lottery next off season”. 

[LookitsPuck]

Elias has a history (albeit as an AGM) of extending core players. He did it with the Astros. The main question: did he not do it here because of John Angelos wanting to keep the books clean for a sale...or as some fundamental shift in GM strategy. I think it's more a function of ownership, because outside of Chris Davis and Adam Jones, when is the last time you saw a longish term contract for a position player? I think Peter Angelos and Duquette screwed the pooch on not extending Machado, and I think Duquette set this organization back years with an incredibly poor trade deadline return for so many players. 

All that said, players I'd look to extend in terms of priority:

• Gunnar Henderson
• Jordan Westburg
• Adley Rutschman

I'm on record as thinking that Adley's second half woes were a function of nagging injury (wrist, back). I think he bounces back next year. But we absolutely need to get Gunnar locked up long term. I don't want to hear any nonsense any longer from GMs or ownership about taking two to tango. If the Braves, Astros, hell the freaking *ROYALS* can do it, we can do it. 

You cannot repeat the sins of letting Machado go. He's been a near 24 bWAR player for the Padres in 6 years. I'm not talking about his recent contract extension, but rather his original 10 year, $300m contract back in 2019 when he was only 26 years old. 

Get it done, Elias. Rubenstein, step up to the plate. 

[Chromehill]

20 minutes ago, theobird said:

What would you like the guy to say? “nope, we have learned from the Rangers and now the Tigers that the key to all of this is to get hot late and get lucky. So, we’re just gonna run it back and hope we hit the lottery next off season”. 

Unfortunately, it's looking like there is a lot of truth in that statement.  I believe Steve Bisciotti (Ravens owner) once said, he wanted to have a good team every year, get into the playoffs enough, eventually things go your way and win the Super Bowl.  This was in response to playing salary cap games for a few seasons and then eventually having to pay the piper with the dead money and being uncompetitive for a few years.

Hopefully the O's can be consistently good and get hot at the end of the season and make a run through the playoffs.  Go back to June 1st and the five best teams in the league were the Orioles, Yankees, Guardians, Phillies and Dodgers.  Two are already out, Guardians fading fast with the Yankees and Dodgers still alive.  

A Tigers - Mets World Series would be quite fitting.

[Warehouse]

2 hours ago, LookitsPuck said:

Elias has a history (albeit as an AGM) of extending core players. He did it with the Astros. The main question: did he not do it here because of John Angelos wanting to keep the books clean for a sale...or as some fundamental shift in GM strategy.

Probably neither - it may be more a function of lining up with players.  The Astros extensions aren’t really comparable.

The first Altuve extension was ridiculously team friendly. Altuve had less than $1MM in career earnings ($15K signing bonus as amateur). He had a good 2012, making the all-star team. However, he struggled in the first half of 2013 with an OPS in the six hundreds.  He fired Boras in May, presumably because he wanted to sign an extension that Boras would have been vehemently opposed to.  The deal announced in July bought out his four remaining years of team control for $12.5MM and gave the Astros control over what would have been his first two FA years via club options that totaled $25MM.

The second Altuve extension occurred after he rehired Boras and was basically about buying out his grossly undervalued club option years.  It was needed to reverse the mistake of the first extension.

The Bregman extension was reached in ARB-3 negotiations.

Neither of these situations are at all comparable to a potential Gunnar extension this offseason.

First of all, Boras had NEVER extended a pre-arb player with seven figures in career earnings (Carlos Gonzalez was below that threshold).  He is philosophically opposed to it.

Second, there are two potential comps that would starting points for a deal: Tatis Jr and Witt Jr.  Boras would reject either of those deals; he would want to do better given his distaste for pre-arb extensions, his strong preference for “record-breaking” deals, and the fact the Gunnar has more career WAR (at least fWAR) than either of those players when they signed their extensions. 

When teams are successful in getting a lot of early extensions done, it’s often a case of having a lot of players amenable to an extension. That generally covers attributes such as not signing a large draft or IFA bonus (i.e., relatively “poor” players), players with geographic ties to the team (big part of Atlanta’s success), not having Boras as their agent, and being more risk-adverse from a financial perspective. 

The team’s risk tolerance also plays a role as you can get burned if they turn into Grady Sizemore.

[Jagwar]

10 hours ago, Can_of_corn said:

So if Westburg ends up being a very good but not MVP level player you aren't interesting in extending him at a team friendly rate?

I disagree with your strategy.

If you can lock up even a young 3 win player at a team friendly rate I say do it.

Cowser had a 4.0 fWAR in 2024. You ready to lock him up for 7-8 years or longer?

[Can_of_corn]

12 minutes ago, Jagwar said:

Cowser had a 4.0 fWAR in 2024. You ready to lock him up for 7-8 years or longer?

At the right cost, sure.