Can someone tell me why Carl Crawford is so impressive?

[TooLiveBrew]

Wells & Meche got their contracts in another day & age, when huge money contracts were flowing like water.

 

Not to mention that Wells's extension covers/ed his age 29-35 seasons. Werth signed a deal to cover his ages 32 through 38 seasons. Good grief is that an awful contract!

 

Oh, and fwiw, the Wells contract is just now getting to the ugly stage:

 

08:$0.5M

09:$1.5M

10:$12.5M

11:$23M

12:$21M

13:$21M

14:$21M

 

The Jays have to be so relieved that Wells bounced back as nicely as he did in '10. However, his defense really appears to have slipped into bad territory the past three seasons, and Wells will probably be getting vastly overpaid for the next four seasons.

[GAME05]

in a way i can understand the Nationals wanting to overpay and secure Werth. they've come in 2nd place for so many big FAs and then thy lose their phenom for a year, so they must have been anxious to make something happen and not come in 2nd place yet again.

[kramnoj]

Wells & Meche got their contracts in another day & age, when huge money contracts were flowing like water. Recently, only the CC Sabathia's of the world have been getting huge contracts.

 

Meche got his deal after the 2006 season. CC got his deal after the 2008 season. Meche was another age and CC was recently?

 

Crawford's deal is groundbreaking in that he is the first player whose value is tied into things like defense and speed to get $20M. None of the other contracts signed so far have been firsts. Lee's may be, we will see what he gets.

[monty57]

Meche got his deal after the 2006 season. CC got his deal after the 2008 season. Meche was another age and CC was recently?

 

Yeah, there was a little slowdown in the economy that started around Sept/Oct 2007.

[kramnoj]

I don't see how that's meaningful in response to my point that neither of the Werth or DLR contracts were groundbreaking. They are both going to be used as data points in future negotiations, just like Wells, Hunter and Soriano could have been used as data points before Werth got his deal and Meche, Pavano, Suppan and I'm guessing others could have been used before DLR.

 

If you are arguing that teams didn't offer big deals the last two because of the economy, that could be something worth exploring. But the economy didn't stop the Brewers from offering an extension to Fielder, Lackey got $82M last year, Beckett got an extension for $68M this year, Lowe got $60M after the 2008 season, Bay got $66M this year, Perez got $36M after 08. Those are just the ones that I remember. I think the only thing that has changed was that more teams had money to spend this year and drove up the competition for some players that have been all stars. It turns out the Nationals really did have money to offer Teixeira, but he chose to take the money and the better chance for a ring.