Of course, but the talk of Verdugo as 80% of Mookie is just wacky. Verdugo has had a nice start but we have people extrapolating a 40 game sample into a year, and then that year into a cheap 5 year run of excellence.
Verdugo's chances of flaming out into nothing are as good as him becoming a consistent 4-5 win player. I honestly don't say that as a knock on Verdugo, I just think people are not fully understanding how different it is to be a multi-year consistent MVP level player versus a promising but largely unproven young player. The error bars are relatively small on the former and massive on the latter.
I think two separate questions are being discussed at the same time here. They are both important and worthy of teasing out.
On the one hand, we're talking about the on field performance of these two players, and I completely agree with
@radsoxfan that some of the excitement in this thread has gone too far. Verdugo has shown the potential to be very good over a short stretch and he comes with an impressive minor league track record. He could very well prove to be an excellent, all-star caliber player but like
@radsoxfan suggests it's ridiculous to be projecting that level of sustained performance over the length of his pre-FA years. What Mookie will provide over the near term is a much safer bet.
On the other hand, we're talking about value relative to cost: a very different question. If we only consider the current year of Mookie's deal, then I'd argue that the value proposition is
clearly in the Red Sox' favor as the Sox weren't going anywhere with or without Mookie this year, and any future value that the team gets out of Verdugo etc. is pure gravy. If we consider Mookie's full contract then it gets a lot murkier, but I can't agree with
@radsoxfan 's premise that Mookie comes with smaller error bars in the context of his entire career.
@radsoxfan , I know you weren't explicitly arguing this but in the context of the discussion it's a relevant take to consider even if you weren't fully intending it. For Mookie's deal to be worthwhile he has to perform. Lack of performance, whether it's due to injury, random variance or age-related decline, carries a substantial downside risk. If Mookie sustains his performance on the high end of what might be expected over time the upside is limited by the cost of the deal. Verdugo (and the rest of the return) do not carry this downside risk. If they don't perform, they simply won't get paid (much). I suppose there is some risk of a player setting their arb floor high and then performing poorly afterward, but even in this case the damage is nothing compared to what a few poor or lost years could do to the value proposition of Mookie's contract. In that sense, the return that the Sox got has very little downside risk and a high potential upside. So in this case I don't think we can say the error bars are smaller for Mookie. If anything, over the length of the deal I think the error bars are a lot larger for that contract.
TL;DR: Yes, if you're talking about pure performance Mookie is a much more solid bet to sustain his current level over the next few years than Verdugo is to sustain his performance this season. But if you're talking about value relative to cost, then I'd argue that Verdugo has a much smaller error bar than Mookie due to the nature of Mookie's contract.
