Say you were offered this bet: Pick three players who are good hitters today who you think will be in five years.
Not long ago, that would have been easy. But offense has become so downtrodden that this is a more difficult assignment now.
Prospects such as Kris Bryant and Byron Buxton are intriguing. But they are prospects. We haven’t seen a major league at-bat from them.
Robinson Cano remains elite. But he is 32 and we can probably expect a dip in these coming years. Miguel Cabrera is 32 in April and we saw his body begin to betray him last season.
Bryce Harper is 22, but has yet to have a season befitting his skills and has a tendency to run into walls. Buster Posey is a risk because of the withering impact of catching. Jose Abreu is intriguing, but I would love to see one more season before gambling on him. Yasiel Puig is so combustible as a player and person that I could see him as the best player in the game in 2019 or out of the game.
Sign me up for the Michael Brantley fan club. However, he has the feel of an above-average performer, not a great one.
To me, there are three good bets – Mike Trout, Andrew McCutchen and Giancarlo Stanton. And I felt a whole lot better about that bet on Stanton before he took a Mike Fiers fastball to the face that ended last season. We will have to see how he responds in the future to pitches up and in. Sure, it would have been better for the Marlins to wait to see that. But if they did, this deal very possibly goes away.
So they took the risk. Because what is rare is valuable, and think about what we are talking about here: three position players who we think are stars today who will be five years from now. That is rare. Maybe your list is a little different. But it just is not a long list.
Stanton is 25. He just led the NL in slugging percentage. He had 37 homers, nine more than any other righty hitter in the NL. He is a special athlete, known as a great guy.
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Does that add up to a 13-year, $325 million contract? Who knows? I have covered major league baseball for three decades and every time a new financial hurdle is crossed, I hear about the apocalypse for the sport. It hasn’t come yet and it is nowhere on the horizon.
This is a $9 billion industry, and in a $9 billion industry, the special performers get paid. Stanton is special. I will not insult anyone by suggesting $25 million annually is a bargain. But Stanton is probably worth $35 million a season right now, likely will be for the next five years. Stretching the contract over this length of time allows the Marlins to pay less per year.
Stanton also gets all the protection. He receives a no-trade clause – the first ever given by Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria. He negotiated the right to opt out of his contract after six years. So at 31, if he decides that the money is better elsewhere or, more important, that Loria has not kept his promise to invest to make the Marlins a contender, he can escape.
This is where we are as 2014 turns to 2015 in MLB: The Marlins, not the Yankees, are the first to crest $300 million. It should be a scary reminder, in fact, to the Yankees and their fans that players like this hardly ever get out into the free-agent market any longer. That $9 billion is spread around enough that South Beach’s team can tie up Stanton for probably his career and the only team north of border, Toronto, can give Russell Martin five years – both on the same day in November.
Stanton is not perfect. He strikes out a bunch. He has to prove he can play post-beanball. But what is rare is valuable and in 2014, Stanton is a rarity.