It’s been a busy month or so, and I’m just now starting to catch up on baseball, so forgive me for the late addition to the Fernando Tatís Jr. contract conversation.
With it still relevant, though (that’s part of the beauty of a 14-year deal), here goes:
From 2029 through 2034, Tatís will be paid $36 million each season. That’s a significant amount of money. It would make him among baseball’s highest-paid players this year. By 2034, it will likely not make him among baseball’s highest-paid players. Which makes sense. By 2034, Tatís will likely not be one of baseball’s best players. It’s possible he’ll still be a good player. He projects as well as any 22-year-old can project. But players age, and uncertainty is wide, and being one of baseball’s best players is a tall task.
A question, then, is whether $36 million per season will be worth Tatís’s production over those six years. And the temptation is to say that it will be, and that the market is working in advance, and that the Padres’ confidence in the contract is a reflection of their faith that baseball is going to continue to boom financially the way it has over recent decades. But the truth is that the way the contract is structured makes that $36 million 1) worth less than $36 million right now (because of future discounting) and 2) really, a delayed payment for Tatís’s performance earlier in the contract.
Back when the contract was signed, Ben Clemens used ZiPS and recent arbitration numbers to break down the true cost of the contract, over at FanGraphs. What he found:
With ZiPS projections for those years in hand, I can tell you that the math works out to $6.6 million per projected WAR, a phenomenal rate for the Padres; it’s less per win than they paid Manny Machado, and they had to include a player option in his deal to sweeten the pot.
Clemens goes on to note that while this is, in a way, a bargain for the Padres, it’s also a risk-conscious move by Tatís:
You can hardly blame someone for taking a Scrooge McDuck-level pile of money after 143 major league games.
And later:
This is simply a safe decision to take a ludicrous sum of money.
In other words, this deal is unique. This player is unique. This situation is unique. It probably doesn’t reflect optimism on anyone’s part about the continued financial growth of baseball, but at the same time, it doesn’t reflect pessimism, and if it does, it’s Tatís’s own pessimism, which is likely just justifiable risk-aversion with a large dash of diminishing returns (when you have 340 million dollars, the next 60 million dollars aren’t as earth-shaking as when you only have 100 million dollars, or when you have one and a half million dollars, which is roughly what Tatís has earned so far in his career).
Interesting contract. Interesting team. Interesting marketing.
Nothing much to say about baseball’s financial health.
