Carl Crawford is a very nice baseball player. He gets on base at a solid rate, hits a few home runs, steals bases at an excellent clip, and plays fantastic defense in left field. Due to his all-around contributions, Crawford probably ranks among the top 20 position players in baseball.
When he signed a seven-year, $142 million deal with the Red Sox last night, Crawford became the seventh-highest paid player in baseball. It should be noted that of the six players ahead of him — Alex Rodriguez, Ryan Howard, Joe Mauer, C.C. Sabathia, Johan Santana and Mark Teixeira — at least half of their contracts already appear to be overpays and potential long-term albatrosses.
Based on Fangraphs’ WAR — which heavily values Crawford’s defense — the newest Red Sox has been worth between $25 and $28 million the last two seasons, meaning he’ll likely be worth his contract for at least the next couple of years. But since much of Crawford’s game is based on his legs, it’s no sure thing he’ll be providing ample return on his contract in its waning years, when he’ll be in his mid-30s.
The Red Sox’ position is defensible. They managed 89 wins in baseball’s toughest division despite a rash of injuries in 2010, and they traded for Adrian Gonzalez earlier this offseason. Boston must capitalize on the years it has with one of baseball’s most valuable assets — a duo of excellent young pitchers in Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz. The additions of Crawford and Gonzalez make the team obvious favorites for postseason play in the next few years, and flags fly forever and all that.
Matt Cerrone suggested recently — in a post I can’t currently dig up — that top free agents this offseason could be getting such huge contracts because of teams’ recent trend toward locking up young players to long-term deals. That creates more competition for the few top-flight players that do hit the market, so contracts become more expensive. Supply and demand and whatnot.
So by that rationale, Crawford and Jayson Werth are not wild overpays, teams just know that the new price of free agents is high, and teams have more flexibility to sign free agents to fill holes because they’ve got many of their homegrown players locked down to reasonably team-friendly deals. The Sox, for example, have Lester, Kevin Youkilis and Dustin Pedroia under contract for several years at below-market rates.
Anyway, if that’s true, it would stand to reason that at some point the market should start turning back around. If Mike Stanton or Jason Heyward sees the type of money that Werth and Crawford are getting on the open market, he could opt to wait out free agency instead of letting his team buy out his arbitration years and the few seasons beyond. That means less money in the near-term and significantly more risk to the player, of course — one injury could jeopardize a life’s worth of money — but as the reward grows greater, it’s hard to imagine more players not taking that risk.
And then eventually, I guess, the cycle repeats itself.
In the here and now, I wonder how Crawford’s contract affects Jose Reyes’ status with the Mets. From 2006-2008, Reyes was a very comparable player to Crawford, only playing a premium position. He always says he loves New York and he wants to be a Met, but if he returns to form in 2011, he will likely stand to make a ton of money on the open market.
The team should probably work to lock up Reyes to an extension as soon as it determines he’s healthy and productive and apt to be the shortstop in Flushing for the long-term. If he’s playing well, Reyes will likely become more expensive as he approaches free agency and as he and his agent begin to consider the offseason payoffs to players like Crawford and Werth.
The second most notable thing about Boof Bonser is that he was once traded with Joe Nathan and Francisco Liriano for A.J. Pierzynski.
At that rate, he hardly seems like an awful signing (consider that it took over a million to lock down Kelvim Escobar for 2010). As Simon points out, he yields a decent amount of ground balls and is decently, if not spectacularly, effective.
If the Mets don’t throw all of the $50-60 million that comes off the books after this season back into the team’s payroll in the offseason, of course, fans will revolt. They’ll accuse small-market Sandy of being cheap, and argue that a big-market team should never cut payroll from season to season.
Tedquarters 