Going through the "Best offers" thread, here's what we had collectively suggested:
6/162
5/160
6/150 with maybe some escalators
7/175
7/175
6/165 with opt outs
6/156 with incentives and an option for a 7th year
4/105
6/175
5/160
4/100
6/150
7/177
7/196 referencing speculation by Jim Bowden
4/110 with mutual options for a 5th/6th/7th year
7/200 plus 2 option years (this was by
@Dewey'sCannon )
7/210
5/130 plus a vesting option to bring it to 6/150
7/160
@nvalvo wrote, "So, Heyman predicts that Bogaerts will get 8/$225m, which I think we can safely interpret as what the Boras camp would like to see."
So here's the thing. Our longest contract was Dewey's Cannon, for 7 years plus two option years to get to 9. Of the 19 submissions in that thread, only 7 of them went to 7 years. That means that 12 of the 19 (63%) of the suggested HIGHEST offers were for 6 or fewer years.
Xander got *11*.
Dewey's Cannon also suggested the highest overall possible contract if the option years happened, so it would have been about 9/257 if it all came to pass.
Which was way higher than anyone else here. It was also $23 million short of what X got.
The average contract we suggested was about 6/159 ($26.5m AAV).
In other words, we as a collective group got the AAV approximately right (X is getting $25.4m AAV), but we were WAY, WAY off in both years and dollars. He ended up getting about DOUBLE what we had collectively suggested, on average.
Holy crap.
So here's the thing. Here's the median of the top 5 team opening day payrolls year to year since 2012 (so the last 11 years). That's a clunky way of saying the third highest payroll each year. I'm using this to reference a super high, but not THE highest, payroll each year. Let's see the trend.
http://www.stevetheump.com/Payrolls.htm
2012: $173m (Bos)
2013: $165m (Phi)
2014: $180m (Phi)
2015: $187m (Bos)
2016: $182m (Bos)
2017: $200m (Bos)
2018: $186m (LAD)
2019: $206m (NYY)
2020: skip due to Covid warping the numbers
2021: $180m (Bos)
2022: $240m (NYY)
So in 11 years the #3 payroll in MLB has gone from $173m to $240m. Not linear growth. That represents about a 39% increase from 2012, or about $6m a year on average. So let's just have fun and project that out.
Year: #3 payroll - % of payroll taken up by Xander's $25.5m
2023: $246m - 10.4%
2033: $342m - 7.5% (the $342m number is 39% growth from the $246m number)
So relative to the overall team payroll, Xander's percentage will obviously go down a sizable amount.
But still.
ELEVEN years.
TWO HUNDRED EIGHTY MILLION dollars.
SOSH, we weren't even CLOSE.