![]() Yes, the Mets and Padres and even the New York Yankees - who re-signed Aaron Judge for $360 million and inked Carlos Rodón for $162 million last winter prior to their worst season in decades - are inspiring angst right now. The highs of signing a superstar can mean a more crushing fall during a summer swoon.īut the Rangers are a terrific counterpoint, suggesting that - wait a minute - maybe some of those days of disappointment are worth it for what might still follow. There’s undeniable truth to the sarcastic bite of this interpretation. To use 2023 as an example, the New York Mets and San Diego Padres won the offseason with splashy additions such as Justin Verlander and Xander Bogaerts, but the shine wore off once actual baseball was being played on the field. One way to hear the phrase “winning the offseason” is as a winking or euphemistic barb. Winning the offseason means upping the ante So as teams start to jockey to win this offseason, let’s take a second to think about what that actually means. That’s great for holiday conversation fodder with your uncle, but it might lead you to some misguided and unnecessarily depressive places if you’re hoping to see your baseball team succeed. Almost all of MLB’s mega-deals are long-term propositions constantly being emotionally evaluated based on what happened yesterday. Like spouting opinions about a single stock on a single day in the market, it is easy to make bold proclamations that seem correct and easy to forget about them when they turn out to be completely wrong. Big contracts attached to big names are the lowest-hanging fruit baseball has to offer. The point is that we as a baseball community want to render judgment on these news-making contracts at all times. The deals that were deemed failures one year were worth every penny the next year. ![]() The ensuing World Series run was propelled not by the most recent big-ticket signing - deGrom, who made six starts before going down due to an elbow injury that required Tommy John surgery - but by Seager and Semien (and Nathan Eovaldi and a host of others, but you get the point). The adjustment involved elevating GM Chris Young to top decision-maker and again spending vigorously, this time on pitchers, headlined by Jacob deGrom. They took their first shot that season, then adjusted. More accurately, the Rangers committed $500 million to have 10 chances at glory with Seager, seven with both middle-infield stars and at least four while both are still in or around their peaks. It’s patently incorrect - yet ubiquitous in baseball conversation - to flatten six- or 10-year contracts into lump-sum losses, as if the team defaulted on a debt that turned into an immediate anchor around their necks. There’s no questioning the failure part: The 2022 Rangers were trying, and the major-league team did not live up to the organization’s hopes, but the $500 million couldn’t have possibly soured in one disappointing campaign. While the Rangers committed to paying Seager and Semien $500 million in total, they paid only $58 million to that duo for the failed 2022 season and only $160.5 million to the entire roster that year, a middling 16th in MLB. The New York Post’s headline said the move came after a “$500 million failure,” which is both incorrect and illustrative of the most common fallacy we fall into when assessing free agency. Manager Chris Woodward was fired, and days later, ownership dismissed longtime president of baseball operations Jon Daniels. ![]() In the season that followed that winter of trumpeted intent, the 2022 Rangers went 68-94.
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