Rob

I mean, there's a reason we celebrate Bobby Bonilla day every year. That was an early example of a pretty extreme deferral. And Scherzer's big contract with the Nationals deferred about half his pay. This is the biggest deferral ever, no doubt. But as TT said, this isn't really a "loophole" in the CBT. He basically took a 10 year / $460 million dollar contract. And he also agreed to loan the Dodgers $440 million with no payments until 2034, and those payments will run until 2043. Over the course of that $440 million dollar loan, they'll pay him back in the amount of $680 million.

Manfred always has the "best interests of baseball" clause. But he's unlikely to utilize it here.

Alright, how's this for a lightning rod idea? The Cubs should sign Josh Donaldson. The bad news -- he just turned 38. He's coming off a .152/.249/.418 slash line in 51 games. And he's a notorious clubhouse cancer. The good news -- that terrible slash line came with a .115 BABIP, so there's definitely a fair amount of bad luck involved, and thus reason to hope for a bounceback. He still takes walks and hits the ball pretty darn hard. And he's still an above-average defender at the hot corner. In 2021 and 2022 he put up 3.0 and 1.7 fWAR in about 130 games. He's basically Patrick Wisdom, if Wisdom could actually field the ball. Also, he's said 2024 is definitely his last year. And I recently read a Pujols conspiracy that basically said that MLB only tests their players twice during a year. Once at the beginning of the season, and then once more at some point during the season. If you get tested early in the season, you can hop on PEDs for the rest of the season as long as you don't care about getting popped during offseason testing. And since he's retiring, he shouldn't care about that. Donaldson seems like the exact sort of horsefeathers to do this if it's true.

Agreed. I'm trying very hard not to study today, and being left to spitball about things I know won't happen isn't even a fun distraction.

It's unlikely. But it's not impossible. If he was going to a juggernaut of a team -- LAD or ATL or wherever -- I could totally see him waiving the NTC. He also grew up in Pennsylvania, so I could see him going lateral to a team like the Phillies. That said, I don't see any obvious fits. And speculating on three-team proposals gets way out there.

Honestly? There's no way to answer that question definitively. From a marketing and merchandising perspective, so long as he stays relevant, it's possible that Ohtani pays for himself without even considering his on-field contributions. He may well create a generation of Dodgers fans, and set up a pipeline for future Japanese talent. Not to mention all the jerseys he'll sell. While on-field value is easier to calculate, it's still tough. I haven't looked it up in a while, but not too long ago people were using roughly $8-9M as the value of a win on the free agent market. Taking the conservative number there, he'd need to be worth ~ 8.75 wins per season to be "worth" $70M per season. But that's not what he's actually being paid. So we need a better idea of what the net present value of his contract is to figure that out. If he's really only making $50M per season, he'd only need to be worth ~6.25 wins at $8M per win. Or as few as 5 wins if we end up at $10M per win on the market. But even that isn't accurate -- as teams have largely tried to stop paying the below-average players the full value of their contributions. Instead, they're trying to concentrate wins on the roster -- a guy like Trout was considered to be worth more money just because it's hard to get that many wins in a single roster spot. Well, Ohtani is poster child for consolidating a bunch of production into a single roster spot. He basically creates a whole bench spot by being both the DH and a member of the starting rotation. So even if the market says $8M a win or whatever, being able to consolidate that much production into a single roster spot may be worth $12M or $15M. So long story short -- we will never be able to accurately say whether he's been "worth" the contract or not unless we see something approaching either 99th percentile or 1st percentile outcomes here.

No worries. You're newer here. You'll adjust to the vibe. My apologies as well -- I'm sure I didn't respond as kindly as I should have. If memory serves, the positional adjustment from CF to 1B is on the order of 15 runs. So if we have the choice of running a Bellinger type out there as an average CF or 1B, we gain approximately 1.5 wins by making him a CF. It's probably a bit more in this case, as defensive statistics generally paint him as a better CF than a 1B -- though that could change with more reps. I'm just not sure how we improve the team at this point. We need to add some position players, but the free agent cupboard is pretty bare. Bellinger is solid, but he's going to be priced like a good defensive CF. And we've already got one of those in PCA. So if we sign Bellinger, we need to either shuffle people around into different positions (hence the Happ to 1B idea), or trade PCA. Chapman is probably a decent upgrade at 3B, but the price scares me given some of the underlying metrics. I said coming into this offseason that we probably needed to add about 8 fWAR for me to feel good about the offseason. Normally that's not a big problem when a team has such glaring holes as we do. But the FA market just doesn't line up with our needs this year, and the trade block isn't much better.

Or the generally rude and dismissive responses in general. This isn't a Facebook comments section.

And for that matter, he rated as a 0 by OAA and RAA, and a 0.3 by UZR. Only DRS saw him as particularly valuable, at 5 runs.

Carlos Santana is listed pretty generously at 5'11" and 215 lbs, and he's always been a heck of a defender at 1B. Height can help cover up some deficiencies, but in so far as there might be a minimum height necessary in order to be adequate, I think only Nick Madrigal would be disqualified on the current roster.

This isn't trying to sort out which of Jeter or Arod plays SS. It's Ian Happ. And if Ian Happ has such an ego that he fights a move to 1B, his intractibility would hurt his free agent market more than the position switch would. He'd move. He might not be happy about it. But there's no doubt he'd do it.

This isn't 1996. Teams don't give a horsefeathers if you get a gold glove for your defense. They've got their whole analytics department whispering in the GMs ear not just about general defensive value, but metrics that granularly break down precisely what a player can and cannot do effectively. How fast is his jump? How efficient are his routes? What's the release time on his throws? Etc... Every single front office in baseball is going to come to their own conclusions of his defense, and I'm sure a bunch of them already think he's a 1B. The gold gloves look good on a mantle or a press release, and that's just about it. Maybe if you're lucky and get one during your pre-arb years you can parlay it into a bit of extra cash from a clueless arbitrator. But that's not his situation. Acting like people out there give a crap about GGs in LF. C'mon...

Okay, consider me interested. Is your argument that 1B is actually harder than LF? Or are you arguing that Happ is so bad in LF that he needs to be skipped over 1B entirely and moved straight to DH? Or something else entirely?

Something I've been noodling is whether it makes sense to try to move Ian Happ to 1B. He played a little bit of 2B and 3B for us way back when. He was pretty bad at each. But despite snagging a GG in LF, the metrics are pretty mixed on him out there. I think he could be a fine 1B with a little practice. FA is a wasteland right now, but upgrading an OF spot is going to be easier than 1B. Heck, even if we're thinking of bringing back Bellinger and giving PCA a shot, I think it makes more sense to deploy Bellinger in LF and Happ at 1B rather than putting Bellinger at 1B.

Because food can often be an addiction. But unlike heroin or alcohol or other substances you can give up and avoid entirely, people will always need to have some food to survive. So for many it can be a much harder thing to manage.

I just wanna know if Yusei Kikuchi ever got his sushi. Sometimes when I'm alone at night I just picture him like Huell being left alone at the end of Breaking Bad. Yusei just hanging out by himself in a darkened sushi restaurant, hoping the door will open....

I'm still surprised we haven't been linked to Brandon Belt. He's 36 years old, and a lot of his success in recent years has been at least partially attributable to an inflated BABIP. But he's at least a decent bet to perform reasonably well as the strong side of a 1B or DH platoon. Since we don't really have any in-house options for either aside from guys the FO seems down on, he strikes me as a decent pickup.

Imagine a contract that paid $1M for ten years, and had a deferred balloon payment of $690M in the year 2060. That $690M in 2060 is a lot less valuable than it would be now. Inflation being what it is, $275M now has roughly the same buying power as getting $690M in 2060. Getting the money upfront thus has a huge advantage for the player. So when contracts with large deferrals are signed, the CBT looks at the "net present value" of the contract. Not what the buying power will be later, but what is equates to now.

It only helps a tiny bit for luxury tax purposes. But for actual payroll under that hypothetical, he'd "only" cost $30M per year (plus luxury tax). That would help a lot with roster construction.

I saw something earlier mentioning "unprecedented" deferrals. That's certainly drawn my attention. If this is a Bobby Bonilla situation, where Shohei is getting healthy paychecks well into his retirement, it could certainly make an impact.

I am very interested to see what the details are on the deferrals. Honestly, it might bring the real value of this contract down into the $550-600M range.

I just read through the last six hours of happenings. Beyond crazy.

Bellinger has never made sense this offseason. He's going to get paid like a premium defensive CF. But PCA is going to get every opportunity to be the CF of the future. Going forward with us, Bellinger would likely be slotted in primarily as 1B. That's a huge waste of resources.

We also have no reliable information that he hasn't come to Wrigley, or doesn't plan to.

Cubs lose no players during the major league phase. I'm not gonna keep track of the minor league phase.