I'd say that an extension for Bogaerts should be a high priority over the off season. I want to lay out the reasoning behind a deal I think would be conceivable, made with the
very large assumption that Bogaerts finishes the season healthy, having compiled the 6 fWAR season he's currently on pace for. I'll be very interested to refine this with your input.
Some parameters. The three years of arbitration are supposed to approximate 40%, 60%, and 80% of FA value. Ryan Howard, a few years back, set a record with a $10m Arb1 settlement, implicitly valuing him as the $25m AAV player he has since come to be (and will remain through 2016). That followed years worth 2, 6 and 3 fWAR; I think we can agree in retrospect that that valuation was too high, especially back in '08. But I think we can also accept that it would be too low for Xander today. Xander is on a much more promising trajectory than Howard's early seasons. His best comp, I'd say, is a young Alex Rodriguez, whose age 20 and 21 seasons were a bit better and worse respectively, than Xander's first season as I'm projecting it out. FA Rodriguez is a $30m/year player. I think that needs to be Xander's comp value for arb purposes, if Howard was pegged to $25
six years ago, and before the flood of new TV money. It's also a conservative $5m/WAR.
With no extension, years 2/3 are worth $500k per. Year 4 would be $12, Year 5 $18, and Year 6 $24m. So the expected cost of Xander's pre-FA years, going year to year, is about $55m.
He would expect to hit FA in 2020, after his age 26 season. I think it's fair to say that he would be in line for a big deal at that age, so any FA years we want to buy out in an extension need to be well compensated. Mike Trout just gave the Angels three FA years in an extension; let's say Xander does that. We'll consider market rate for those to be $30m per year, also. We're implicitly projecting him as a 5-6 WAR player through the life of the deal, with the upside and downside risks associated with performance variability, injury and inflation more or less balancing out.
$55m pre-FA plus three FA years at $30m per takes us to $145m, or pretty much exactly what Mike Trout signed for over the offseason.
But wait, you're saying — Mike Trout is significantly better than Bogaerts. He's put up back to back seasons worth 10 fWAR and change, and is on pace to repeat that again. This gives us a market-derived sense of the discount that an elite pre-arb player should expect to trade for the security of a long term deal. Mike Trout, a 10 fWAR player, is paid like a 6 fWAR player: a forty percent discount. Trout sold those FA years for $30m that at $5m/WAR would be worth closer to $50m, and we know that $/WAR scales linearly in the FA market.
When Dave Cameron
played this game before Trout's extension, he suggested Trout's FA years should be worth $50m, but ultimately priced them at $40m, basically because the numbers involved seemed too crazy. Trout ultimately signed them away at a steeper discount than Cameron anticipated.
So here's my proposed Bogaerts extension, on the model of the Trout extension. The deal is for 8 years (two pre-arb seasons, all three arb seasons and three FA years; or the 2015-2022 seasons) with a total value of $87 million (or sixty percent of $145). Let's say $85-90. No options of any kind. Bogaerts would hit FA after his age 29 season, already having earned the better part of 9 figures. Including the pre-arb years in the deal would lower the AAV to $11m, which would be a tremendous advantage for roster construction, although it comes at some additional risk. I think both the team and the player would be interested.
Your thoughts?
