The Seattle Mariners have signed second baseman Robinson Cano to a $240 Million / 10 Year deal. This comes as a surprise as many believed he would stay a New York Yankee. This has possibly been one of the biggest moves Jay-Z has made as the head of his Roc Nation Sports agency.
ESPN Reports:
The Seattle Mariners have agreed to terms with Robinson Cano on a 10-year, $240 million contract, marking the most dramatic example to date of a franchise taking the $26 million per team per year in new national TV money and actually spending it. It’s a good deal for Cano and a potentially great one for the Mariners.
That new TV deal, announced 14 months ago, granted broadcast rights to Fox and TBS through 2021. Combine that with the league’s existing ESPN deal, and teams now stand to earn $12.4 billion over the lifetime of the contracts, more than doubling previous totals. Last winter and so far this winter, we hadn’t seen many teams that lack the big media-market power of L.A. or New York or Boston spending top dollar to land marquee players. The closest we’d come was Minnesota signing right-handed starters Ricky Nolasco and Phil Hughes in rapid succession to contracts worth a combined $73 million. This free-agent class, like last year’s, is short on superstars, but it still felt odd that the small- and medium-market clubs that had suddenly received a huge windfall of cash seemed content to stick the money under their mattresses, rather than spending it on good players who could help win games. Credit the Mariners for finally getting it.
In Cano, Seattle has reeled in one of the best players in the game by both traditional and analytical standards. Per Wins Above Replacement, only Miguel Cabrera has produced more value for his team than Cano has over the past four years. During that span, Cano has hit .312/.373/.533, which, even after adjusting for Yankee Stadium’s hitter-friendly confines, still produces a total offensive contribution 48 percent better than a league-average hitter. In addition to boasting prodigious power, Cano is also one of the best contact hitters in the league. And while he’ll never get mistaken for Ted Williams, he has posted the two highest unintentional walk rates of his career over the past two seasons, due in part to a combination of pitchers being more careful with him and some iffy Yankees lineups in 2013, but also to Cano improving his approach at the plate. He’s also one of the league’s best glovemen at second base, which should make the Mariners’ top two starters, Felix Hernandez (51.4 percent ground ball rate) and Hisashi Iwakuma (48.7 percent ground ball rate), very happy.
Of course, these are all things Cano has done in the past. When evaluating the merits of a deal for this many years (the contract will end just before his 41st birthday) and this much money, the question is what Cano will do in the future, and whether he’s being paid reasonable market value for those impending seasons.
The cost of a win on the open market is about $6 million right now, give or take a couple hundred thousand. Cano has been a little better than a six-win player over the past four seasons. Even if we peg him as a five-win player, an average salary of $24 million a year would seem a reasonable price for someone that valuable.
The calculation isn’t that simple, of course. Cano might be a five- or six-win player in 2014, but he almost certainly won’t be in 2019, let alone 2023. Then again, just as we have to bake in year-by-year regression as a player ages, we also have to account for year-by-year salary inflation. If we assume a fairly conservative inflation rate of 5 percent per year (which might be low, given the revenue boom in baseball and recent trends), we get … a deal that still looks like it’ll be pretty close to fair market value, assuming Cano continues to perform like a top-10 player for the next three or four years, with a reasonably gentle decline thereafter.
Cano has played in at least 159 games in each of the past seven seasons, making him the most durable middle infielder in the game, and one of the most durable players at any position. That’s a good start if a team is banking on a player to produce through his thirties and into his early forties, given that baseball players tend to peak by their late twenties. It’s also encouraging given that some studies suggest rapid declines for second basemen in their thirties. For example: ESPN Stats & Info looked at the 10 second basemen other than Cano who posted the top WAR from ages 27 to 30 since the start of the Divisional Era in 1961. Since that time frame lines up with Cano’s last four seasons, the intent was to see how the group (Chase Utley, Joe Morgan, Rod Carew, Chuck Knoblauch, Craig Biggio, Bobby Grich, Ryne Sandberg, Lou Whitaker, Dick McAuliffe, and Brian Roberts) fared in their age 31-to-34 seasons. The results?
