Bryce Harper:
Okay so for a few years now, I've been hearing about how Bryce Harper will be the first $500 million dollar player. The past few years, more and more the market for FA's is changing. Teams are relying more on youth as well as taking chances on hidden gems in places like Korea (Eric Thames). To many teams have been hand cuffed and burnt by big long term deals. Albert Pujols fucked the Angels up pretty good. He's had a few decent years with them but also some mediocre ones. This year is a disaster, and has four more years and 120 mil left on his contract. He also has some dumb clause in his contract that he gets a job for 10 years paying him a million a year for being the community ambassador or something stupid like that. So we can call it 130 million. He'll be 41 in the last year of his contract making 30 million that year, and my guess is his numbers will be awful. The Twins will be doing cartwheels when they can get Joe Mauer of the books after the 2018 season.
Everyone keeps assuming Harper will go to the Yankees, but the Yankees a while back said they're getting out of those kind of contracts. The media refuses to believe them I guess, but I don't. They just had the same problem with A-Roid, Sabathia and Teixeira. Not to mention it ain't the old Steinbrenner running the show anymore, it's the next generation and they care much more about the bottom line. The Yankees have also not being drawing very well the last bunch of years.
I mean we saw first hand this year with EE testing the market, turning down 80 million only to find that was 15 million more than anyone else was willing to give him. JB wanted 125 million for 5 years and the only team willing to pay him was the Jays at 18 million for basically one year, and he was lucky to get that.
Now Bryce harper might be a bit different because he'll only be 26 by the time he's an FA, but the other part of the problem is there's only about 1/3 of the teams that can even afford a contract like this. Even teams that can afford these contracts, that can usually only have a 1 or 2. For example, Cincinnati still has way to much left on Votto, so it will be years before they can sign another big name. Washington already signed Sherzer to a crazy deal so they can't have to much room left. Arizona has Greinke at 35 million a year over the next 5 years. My point being, some of the middle market teams have already signed their one super star, so there's not to many of them left, and the big market teams have similar problems. I mean how many David Price type contracts can Boston dish out???
So taking all things into consideration, I'm curious to see what some of you baseball guru's think. My guess is he gets 10 years at 40 million a year, getting him a 400 million contract, but I definitely think the bubble is going to burst soon. I think he'll end up with the Dogers or the Mets. It's been a while since the Mets have signed a big shitty contract like this so they're kind of due, and the Dogers seem to be willing to spend anything to get themselves a World Series.