Once upon a time, Albert Pujols signed a ten-year, $240-million deal contract with the Anaheim Angels. Two years later, the contract was in trouble. Pujols was underperforming. Five years later, the contract was completely underwater. Pujols was an aging replacement-level player with no positional flexibility, five years of payments left, and little production to speak of over the preceding half a decade. The Angels have had all sorts of problems, but Albert Pujols was and possibly even continues to be a big one. Could the team have done better in the 2014-15 offseason after winning 98 games? We don’t know. But holy cow, did things turn south when Pujols went under the replacement-level line.
It’s cherry-picking to lump every long-term deal together with Pujols’s, but it’s not uncommon for these contracts to yield these results. Barry Zito. Jason Heyward. Even Fernando Tatís Jr. hasn’t exactly dazzled after signing his 14-year extension before the 2021 season, failing to personally appear in a single playoff game. It’s the price you pay to make a big free agent pickup—you get the great player now, they get the security later, you accept the risk of the awkward stages—but you have to be sure that the deal isn’t going to hamstring you. More truthfully, you have to be willing to accept the consequences if it does. 13 years for a soon-to-be-third-baseman with back issues and only two or three seasons left before the decline begins? That leaves a decade of decline as your if-everything-goes-right scenario. The Carlos Correa contract might be right for the Giants, and maybe the price per win will change in future free agent markets (we have 13 years to find out), but at the moment, it’s a bad deal, and the Giants aren’t saying it’s not. They picked up Correa to try to compete right now. They’ll figure out the last decade of it down the line.
Why did 13 years become the thing for Correa to get? I’d love to know. Trea Turner and Xander Bogaerts each getting eleven years probably have a lot to do with it, but what led to them each getting eleven? Pure zeal on the part of ownership in Philadelphia and San Diego and now San Francisco? It’s audacious for all three players. It’s likely to end badly for all three teams. The question is whether the short-term payout will be enough to make the wind-down fine and fair and acceptable.
Jed Hoyer’s in a Tough Spot
I would like each Cubs fan who’s tearing their hair out over the team failing to give 13 years of high pay to a great-not-historic player to sign a contract of their own saying they may not react to whoever next underachieves the way they reacted to Jason Heyward in 2016. If you kept your mouth shut about Heyward, go ahead and complain, but if you lamented that deal from that first summer, just shut up. Yeah, it’d be nice to have an owner who spends like Steve Cohen, but Tom Ricketts doesn’t, and it shouldn’t take the top payroll in baseball to make the playoffs. The Cubs have deeper problems. Problems, I would argue, that Jed Hoyer’s addressing.
What Hoyer seems to be doing, from my vantage point, is trying to build the deepest team in the majors in 2026, with progressively better and deeper teams each year until then. There’s merit to this approach: The Padres are all-in. The Phillies are all-in. The Mets are all-in and then some. Atlanta and Los Angeles and St. Louis and San Francisco are all aggressively trying to win a title right now. That’s seven teams already, competing for only six playoff spots. The lanes in the National League are narrow. The Cubs, meanwhile, have the beginnings of elite depth. Their farm system is among baseball’s best despite lacking out-and-out stud prospects. They have a seemingly good, young shortstop under club control through 2025. They have a probably good, in-his-prime outfielder under contract through 2026. The first wave of the remade minor league system is already bearing fruit in the form of Justin Steele and perhaps soon Matt Mervis. Things are trending in the right direction, and the building blocks are there. But.
But the Cubs are far away. Far, far away.
We keep saying this, but this Cubs roster stinks, taken as a whole. The rotation has a third starter as the ace, a fourth starter as the second starter, etc. There is no reliable bat at the corner infield or designated hitter positions. There is half an MLB-capable catcher present in the entire organization. It’s a bad, bad roster, and it would take plugging all those holes to merely get past the Brewers and up near the Cardinals in win expectations this year. Could the Cubs plug all those holes? Probably, yes. They probably could pull it off. But if they do that, extending Ian Happ’s going to be really hard. If they do that, taking on salary to grab a starter at the deadline’s going to be really hard. If they do that, covering for the various players who don’t work out—and some don’t work out, that’s how the game works—is going to be really hard. The measured approach these last couple offseasons is the right move for maximizing total championships. But it’s scary, because it more or less forfeits years like 2023, and that’s not insignificant either. You’re taking away rolls of the dice from yourself in exchange for bettering your odds when you do roll. That math is tough.
The cautious expectation is still that the Cubs will land Dansby Swanson, which is actually very much in line with the original expectations for this offseason, but acknowledging that doesn’t get radio hits or Twitter followers, and ripping Jed Hoyer to shreds for not mortgaging the franchise’s future on Carlos Correa’s ability to maintain flexibility gets a lot of radio hits and Twitter followers. Even if the Cubs don’t land Swanson, though: The situation’s the same. The roster is deeply flawed, the farm system is good and growing, uncertainty is everywhere but at least Hoyer’s maintaining flexibility.
Expect 80 wins. Expect 85 in 2024. Expect 95 in 2025, and then a new window. Quite possibly one in which the Mets and Phillies and Padres are cashing the checks they’re writing right now.
(Ope, seeing the Dodgers signed Syndergaard. Don’t love seeing another name off the board, but if they’re only signing one more new guy—which is reasonable, with Steele and Wesneski and Stroman and Taillon and Hendricks and probably Smyly—you didn’t want it to be Syndergaard. And, this is another sign the Cubs are focused on Swanson and will figure out the rest after that. Not that they’re going to give Swanson a great deal. They’ll probably overpay. But that overpayment is likely to be less severe than the Correa overpayment is for the Giants.)
Sean Miller’s Safe
Speaking of things that drew massive reactions and were supposed to turn out very differently…
The NCAA isn’t meaningfully punishing Arizona or Sean Miller for the ol’ wiretap scandal. Two assistants are getting show-cause penalties, but nothing at the top for the scandal, which was in the end just that an assistant, Book Richardson, took a bribe to help persuade Arizona players to sign with a specific agency upon going pro. That’s it.
Maryland vs. UCLA
One big game tonight, and it’s not fully headliners, but UCLA’s around the conversation and Maryland’s earned themselves a reputation as a good-not-great team who’ll give anyone a game. For UCLA, it’s their third game against a surefire tournament team, but they’re 0-2 so far. With it in College Park, it could easily become 0-3 before they play Kentucky at the Garden on Saturday. Not the most meaningful thing in the world, but it’s fair to wonder if some pressure’s mounting on the Bruins, even if just internally.
Mississippi State’s New Coach
Amidst the grieving process following the tragic passing of Mike Leach, Mississippi State was left head coach-less. Today, reports emerged that they’ve promoted defensive coordinator Zach Arnett to take over the job full-time. I don’t know much at all about Arnett, but even if this is just a formality because Mississippi State doesn’t want to launch a coaching search right before Signing Day, it’s probably a worthwhile decision. Spare yourself the rawness.
The F1 Carousel
I don’t know the most about F1, but I do know that the team principal is kind of like the head coach, and the team principal rotation seems to have found stasis again with McLaren promoting Andrea Stella to the job from within after Andreas Seidl went to Alfa Romeo to take over for Frederic Vasseur, who left for Ferrari, where Mattia Binotto’s performance and subsequent resignation left the job vacant.
I likewise don’t know much about the guys involved, but it’s interesting that Alfa Romeo was a destination for Seidl. That’s the piece of this that jumps out. Would like to know whether that was surprising.
**
Viewing schedule for the evening, second screen rotation in italics:
College Basketball (of national significance)
- 9:00 PM EST: UCLA @ Maryland (FS1)
NBA (best game, plus the Bulls)
- 7:30 PM EST: New York @ Bulls (ESPN)
- 9:00 PM EST: Cleveland @ Dallas
NHL (best game)
- 10:00 PM EST: Vancouver @ Calgary (TNT)
