Professor Sauer over at the Sports Economist blog has brought in some additional blogging mates. From their initial posts, the new bloggers are going to be making some nice contributions to this already smart blog.
In this first post, new blogger Brian Goff analyzes the “no-trade” clause demand that has been widely reported as one of the reasons why the Stros’ negotiations with Scott Boras over Carlos Beltran reached impasse shortly before the deadline to consummate a deal.
Professor Goff insightfully points out that the no-trade demand was in the nature of an option in which Boras was demanding that the Stros’ take on additional risk with regard to the Beltran contract. The reason that this may have been a sticking point in the negotiations is that such options are notoriously difficult to price in baseball contracts, and the valuation is different between the player and the ballclub. This is undoubtedly correct, although the pricing on this particular no trade clause probably was made a bit easier by the fact that Boras only needed to protect Beltran for the time until 2009, at which point Beltran could have vetoed any trade as a 10 and five player under the MLB Collective Bargaining Agreement.
So, regardless of whether the no trade demand was a dealbreaker, the Stros have lost out on a player who sure would have looked good next to Berkman and Oswalt in a Stros’ uniform for years to come. But as noted in this earlier post, a good case can be made that the Stros are better off over the long haul in failing to make the deal.
Beltran’s career numbers are .284BA/.353OBA/.490SLG over seven MLB seasons. Those are excellent numbers, but its hard to make that performance justify a $17 mil a year contract over the next the next seven years. In comparison, Vladimir Gurrerero‘s statistics through seven seasons — and just a year before he signed a $70 million, five-year deal with Anaheim — were .322/.386/.588. Guerrero is not as good a fielder as Beltran, and questions about his back certainly held down his value a bit. But the Angels still got a player with noticeably better career hitting stats for $3 million a year less than the Mets will be paying Beltran.
So, while Beltran’s career stat line might take off, my bet is that the Mets will be paying a boatload of money for Beltran by the end of the decade while not getting anywhere close to the hitting production that they had hoped for. In other words, sort of like the Stros’ current situation with Bags.
The Stros are clearly in a rebuilding mode after a very good run over the past decade. Had the club been able to sign Beltran at the Mets’ price for just a couple of years, then the Stros should have pulled the trigger and done the deal. That would have meant that Beltran’s deal would have been coming off the Stros’ payroll at about the same time as Bags and Bidg retire, leaving the Stros with the payroll flexibility to make some moves to transition into the post Bidg-Bags era.
On the other hand, if the Stros had signed Beltran, they could have found themselves in a similar financial straightjacket in 2010 that they presently face with Bags. Although the Stros will not be as good a hitting club in 2005 without Beltran (and, frankly, they were not all that good a hitting team until the last 45 games of the 2004 season), the $100 million they saved on not signing him gives the club the liquidity it needs to make several constructive personnel moves over the next couple of seasons. If the Stros make those moves prudently, then they will likely rebound just fine from the disappointment of not signing Beltran.
As many a savvy businessman has confirmed to me over the years, sometimes the best deal for the company is the one that gets away.