Wait.....a deal for on of the best hitters in baseball and you're willing to center it around JBJ *and* you might be able to add Xander? I mean, we could add Brock Holt as well, maybe even Abad, but I'm not sure how much you REALLY want to give up.
Remember, we're trading contracts here, not just players. And until his recent hot streak, it wasn't actually clear if Stanton's contract had any surplus value at all. Bradley's definitely does.
Bradley's 3 year fWARs, 2015-17, will be something like: 2.5, 5.0, 2.8 (projected). He was a super2, so he'll be in his second of four arb years, which will probably earn him a total of $20m through what we'd expect to be his prime seasons. Let's say 10 WAR, at $2m per. Great value there, something on the order of $50m in surplus value. (Of course, the details depend on the performances and the arb awards. If he gets arb awards on the low-end and posts 5 WAR seasons, it will be MUCH HIGHER.)
Stanton's 3 year fWARs will be 3.9, 1.8, 6.5 (projected). He's slated to earn $77m over the next three seasons, through what we'd expect to be his prime. If he's worth, say, 16 WAR over the next three seasons, that's still a good value, at $5m per WAR. Again, something like $50m in surplus value, but again, huge error bars on the performance side, given his track record.
But the problem with a Stanton contract is the opt-out.
*gasps of horror* *gong sounds*
After 2020, Stanton has an opt out, where he would have to decide if he wants to stick around for 8/$200-ish. If he posts a few more 5-7 WAR seasons, you'd be pleased to have him on that deal, even knowing that he will decline. But if he performs like that, he'll likely leave (or stay!) for something more like 8/$250 or 9/$300. If he
doesn't post a few more 5-7 WAR seasons, he's likely hurt, and you've David Wrighted your whole roster for a decade. This is a player who has rarely stayed healthy for an entire season, even if the performance has been very good while he's been on the field.
So Bradley offers similar surplus value over the next three years to Stanton. Now, my view is that for a large market team, getting a ton of wins out of a single roster spot is worth a fair amount more than a straight surplus value calculation, so you'd give Stanton a considerable edge. But that edge is almost entirely negated by the very large downside risk of Stanton's contract over the years 2021-8.
Trading Bradley and Bogaerts for Stanton might well make the team worse. It may make sense in the short term, if we're thinking of the window under Sale's current deal, but the long term picture gets considerably riskier.
