Yes, but they are up against a mountain of dumb contracts that owners have signed off on in recent years that is now making everyone nervous about laying out 10 years. It's not fair, but every contract from Pujols to Hosmer is stacking up against Harper and Machado's demands. Smart people realize that Harper =/= Hosmer, but owners are using those bad decisions as an excuse to not back the Brinks truck up for the guys who actually deserve it They're making horsefeathers up because they realized they can game the system based off of the horsefeathers player negotiations from the last collective bargaining agreement; stop with your tortured caveats that basically amount to, "look, this is BS, but I can actually kinda see where they're coming from with this BS, so they're not all wrong." The vast majority of teams could easily afford either guy and are simply either choosing not to try (and a bunch of those are simply choosing not to try at anything besides being awful, period), or trying to lowball a couple of generational talents like THAT'S inexplicably the way to course correct shelling out for much older and much worse players (when most of the time those "bad contracts" either paid off or broken even or came pretty damn close; the truly bad ones are still the obvious exceptions and not the rule). Plus it's ridiculous to continually say things like, "nervous about laying out 10 years;" nobody is ACTUALLY paying for either for a decade unless something goes really wrong and they don't opt out well before then. They're horsefeathering disingenuous scum acting like they're locking themselves into a 8 or 10-year deal with a couple of guys this good and this young (nevermind how ridiculous it is to be hemming and hawing even if they WERE actually locking in with guys, again, this good and this young). AGAIN, I'm neither siding with nor excusing the owners. I'm just looking at the reality of the BS circumstances that the owners have created that is depressing the market on Harper and Machado. They have very effectively convinced the common baseball fan that Luxury Tax=Salary Cap, and they've put profit margins above winning. For a small handful of teams, spending this money on these players makes no sense (the Marlins, for example, would not get a good ROI on either, because their entire franchise sucks), but most teams are simply deciding that nickeling and dimeing their way to 75 wins is an acceptable business model