The speculation about Padres third baseman Manny Machado exercising his opt-out clause after the 2023 season came to a stunning conclusion over the weekend, as club and superstar agreed to an 11-year, $350 million contract. The new deal rips up the final six years of the contract that Machado signed before the 2019 season.

If nothing else, tally one team that is apparently not concerned with the short-term hiccups in baseball’s revenues due to the Bally/Diamond bankruptcy; the Padres are one of the teams with a regional sports network (RSN) that is affected. If revenues are up in the air, they have made sure that third base certainly is not, following an extension that will also keep Yu Darvish in town for all or most of the rest of his career. The Padres aren’t trying to be the Rays, the scrappy underdogs that hunt very large game with a sharpened stick; they’re trying to go toe-to-toe with the Dodgers at their own game. This is less David versus Goliath and more M. Bison versus palette-swapped M. Bison in “Street Fighter II.”

My colleague Jay Jaffe covered a lot of the particulars about the Manny situation in San Diego last week, so I’m going to skip the exposition. I think Jay and I both underestimated just how motivated the Padres were to ensure Machado stayed in mustard-and-brown for a long time. We had a ZiPS projection in that piece, but now that we know where he will play and for how long, I ran a new projection.

Let’s just say that ZiPS isn’t overly enthusiastic about the contract, valuing Machado’s future services at $181 million over 11 years. He is a superstar, but there’s a big difference between signing a player before their age-26 season and their age-30 season. Just to illustrate, here’s the projection a second time, but with Machado the age he was when he signed his initial deal with the Friars.

That’s a valuation over $400 million, a notable difference! The sad truth is that even for superstars, the 30s are more often than not a tale of significant decline. Just to illustrate, here are all non-active position players worth between 41–51 WAR through age 29 (Machado is at 46.6) and how they fared in their 30s.

ZiPS actually has Machado aging slightly better than the average player in this group, with an additional three WAR over about 1,000 more plate appearances. The three active players at the end of their careers that I chopped off wouldn’t make this any sunnier a list; none of Miguel Cabrera, Evan Longoria, or Andrew McCutchen have aged particularly well.

Some of the decreased projection is due to the fact that Machado is no longer a defensive star at third base as he was earlier in his career. Defense doesn’t decline as rapidly as people think at the non-speed positions, and the fact that Nolan Arenado’s glove has stayed quite steady gives him kind of a fallback position if his bat declines. Machado no longer has that luxury.

Despite my grumpiness as an analyst who inevitably has to play devil’s advocate, let me emphasize that I’m certainly not shedding any tears for the pocketbooks of team ownership. While speculating what the Padres’ analytics gang has for Machado over the next 11 years would be a wild-ass guess, I know enough to know that ZiPS does not generally give projections that are grossly different from ones that teams run internally. The team’s ownership group, led by Peter Seidler, was no doubt given all the information the team had internally of this type and is also aware of the revenue situation, his personal net worth, and the fact that the big jump in baseball’s luxury tax threshold from 2021 to ’22 is much, much smaller in subsequent seasons of the CBA. They take this risk with the eyes wide open.

Even as a risk, it’s hard to dislike this signing as a fan of baseball. It’s refreshing to see owners who want to keep their teams together, who prioritize putting the best team on the field right now, and who directly challenge another of baseball’s elite franchises. Baseball’s system of playoffs and revenue sharing incentivizes just sneaking into the postseason every year, and if I worked for a team, I’d recommend the same cynical view that is prevalent among franchises. So it’s nice to see a team with a little more ambition, one willing to be happy with the increases in team value rather than also requiring a healthy profit every season to boot.

There remains a big unanswered question in the form of Juan Soto. Keeping him may cost $40 million a year, and I now have to wonder just how far San Diego’s willingness to spend will stretch. Are the Padres really willing to already be at $200 million for 2025–27 with two starting pitchers under contract? The farm system has nowhere near the depth that it had a few years ago, after all; ZiPS had no Padres prospects in its Top 100. While our prospect team placed two, the farm system ranked 26th at the end of last year, and though the new rankings aren’t out yet, I can’t imagine they’ve moved up a ton. But we’ll worry about Soto later.

By signing Machado, the Padres have signaled that they’re here to win now, and that the current aggressive spending isn’t just the apogee between the fire sales that have peppered San Diego’s franchise history. They’re going after the Dodgers on their own turf, and that’s pretty cool. Now the win now team just has to do the hard part and actually win now.

Yu Darvish’s six-year, $108 million extension with the Padres looks innocuous enough. Darvish is absolutely essential to the Padres’ success, and he’s now one of those rare MLB players who’s signed multiple $100 million deals, despite not having reached free agency the first time until his age-31 season.

If anyone can pitch until he’s 42, it’s Darvish, the man who’s got more pitches than can fit in Mary Poppins’ carpetbag. This extension actually has me looking forward to watching Darvish once he gets into his latter-day Zack Greinke era. No, the interesting thing about this contract is not who’s getting paid, who’s doing the paying, or how much money is set to change hands. It’s when. Read the rest of this entry »

On the heels of what was arguably the best season of his career — one in which he set career highs in wRC+ (152) and WAR (7.4), helped the Padres to the NLCS for the first time in 24 years, and finished second in the NL MVP voting — Manny Machado has informed the Padres that he intends to exercise the opt-out in his $300 million contract after this season and test free agency again.

Last Friday, at the Padres’ spring training site in Peoria, Arizona, the All-Star third baseman confirmed that in December prior to the Winter Meetings, agent Dan Lozano gave the Padres a February 16 deadline to reach agreement on extending the 10-year, $300 million contract Machado signed in February 2019. According to a report by the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Kevin Acee, the Padres made just one offer after hearing from Lozano; two days before the deadline, they offered to add five years and $21 million per year ($105 million total) to the five years and $150 million that will remain on his deal after this year. The proposed package of 10 years and $255 million wasn’t enough to satisfy Machado, and so with the deadline having passed, he told reporters that now that he’s in camp he wants to focus on the upcoming season rather than on contract negotiations. Read the rest of this entry »

On October 27, 2008, I lay sprawled on the carpet in front of the television, watching as Cole Hamels twirled yet another postseason masterpiece. My new puppy sat calmly by my side, having finally learned the rally towel was my toy, not his. Hamels pitched six innings that night; he could have gone deeper were it not for a 48-hour rain delay, but his efforts proved to be enough. Two days later, I was jumping with joy into my father’s arms as Hamels clutched the World Series trophy in his.

Fifteen years later, the living room carpet is long gone. The TV remains, although it’s wildly out of date. That new puppy is now officially geriatric, with greying fur and two bad hips. My father would prefer I no longer jump into his arms; he gets enough of a workout carrying our 50-pound dog up and down the stairs.

Forty different players took the field for the Phillies in 2008. Thirty-nine have since retired. Hamels, however, isn’t quite ready to submit to the passage of time. On Thursday afternoon, the veteran left-hander signed a minor league deal with the Padres and will head to Peoria as a non-roster invitee, hoping to make his way back to the big leagues at 39 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Wacha is a boring free agent. Don’t take it personally, Padres fans or Cardinals fans from his electrifying 2013 run; he’s still a very competent pitcher who delivered a classic playoff performance as a rookie. At this point in his career, though, he’s a competent rotation filler, a fourth or fifth starter who offers bulk innings at a reasonable rate. As Michael Baumann already detailed, that suits San Diego just fine.

Naturally, since this is the Padres, that bread-and-butter signing comes with a wildly complicated contract structure. It’s a one-year, $7.5 million deal, or a three-year, $39.5 million deal, or a four-year, $26 million deal with innings pitched bonuses — or even some fraction thereof. No word on whether it’s also Optimus Prime, but it’s certainly a transformer:

Wacha deal with Padres:
Four years, $26M

Signing bonus $3.5M

2023 $4M

Club options, must be picked up simultaneously
2024 $16M
2025 $16M
 
If club options declined
2024 player option $6.5M
2025 player option $6M
2026 player option $6M
All exercised one at a time.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) February 16, 2023

One thing is for sure: the Padres aren’t afraid of a little complexity. They signed Nick Martinez to a similar deal earlier in the offseason. These nested and mutually exclusive options are hard to parse, but I think they’re an interesting idea, so let’s talk through the different ways this deal could go and what it means for both Wacha and the Padres. Read the rest of this entry »

They say you should never go to the grocery store hungry. If you do, you could end up like the Padres: A cart full of shortstops, eye-catching extensions for key players like Yu Darvish and Robert Suarez, and even a couple fun veteran DH types from the end caps to snack on during the drive home. Then you get home, unload the car, and realize you forgot something essential like bread, or coffee, or the entire back half of a starting rotation.

So you have to go back to the store and pick up a Michael Wacha before spring training:

Wacha agreement with Padres has complex structure that could earn him more than $24M over four years, sources tell @TheAthletic. Deal includes player and team options that protect both Wacha’s upside and downside while lowering his AAV for luxury-tax purposes. Pending physical.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) February 15, 2023

Read the rest of this entry »

Gary Sanchez finally has a team… sort of. Last week, he was one of two catchers named to Team Dominican Republic’s roster for the 2023 World Baseball Classic, which gets underway next month. Meanwhile, although pitchers and catchers have reported to major league camps this week, Sanchez still doesn’t have a destination, as he remains a free agent.

By our count, Sanchez is one of just four position players who put up at least 1.0 WAR last year but remain on the market, along with shortstop Elvis Andrus (3.5), outfielder Jurickson Profar (2.5) and infielder José Iglesias (1.0). Admittedly, he’s not coming off a great season with the Twins, but Sanchez’s 1.3 WAR was respectable, his 89 wRC+ matched the major league average for catchers, and he had his best defensive season since 2018, reversing a multiyear decline.

Aside from rumors of interest from the Giants in January and the Angels earlier this month, the Sanchez burner of the hot stove has barely flickered this winter, but things heated up a bit in the wee hours of Wednesday after Sanchez and strength and conditioning coach Theo Aasen shared a short Instagram video of the 30-year-old backstop doing some exercises and baseball activities while wearing a shirt with the Yankees’ insignia. Read the rest of this entry »

Be honest: you didn’t think A.J. Preller was done with headline-making this offseason, did you? The Padres have built a team through outrageous swings — trades that no one else in baseball would attempt and free-agent signings that make opposing teams whine with envy. After signing Xander Bogaerts earlier this offseason, though, it seemed like even Preller might be out of moves. There was no one left to sign, no one left to trade for.

The joke’s on us, though, because the Padres found a new way to make news: they signed Yu Darvish to a six-year extension worth $108 million, as MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell reported. The deal replaces the final year of his existing contract, which would have ended after this year. Instead of hitting free agency, Darvish will remain a Padre, presumably for life at this point.

Darvish has long been one of my favorite pitchers thanks in large part to his dizzying array of pitches. He threw six different ones at least 5% of the time last year and even dabbled with two more. Six pitches, six years: I know an article setup when I see one. If you’ll indulge me in some gratuitous gif-posting, I’ll walk you through six ways to think about this contract. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past two weeks, the American sports landscape has been held in the thrall of the Super Bowl. It’s secular American Christmas. The event so indelibly planted in our cultural consciousness advertisers get around the trademark by calling it “the Big Game,” and everyone knows what they mean. The Chiefs and the Eagles (Go Birds!) testing their mettle for 60 minutes on the largest stage our country has to offer (interrupted periodically by commercials and musical interludes).

No, I haven’t suffered some kind of episode and forgotten that this site is devoted entirely to a different sport. Because, you see, if you watch the Super Bowl you’ll get to see some baseball players: Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and Eagles receiver A.J. Brown.

Mahomes affinity for baseball is well known, given that he is 1) one of the most famous athletes in the country 2) a minority owner of the Kansas City Royals and 3) the son and namesake of an 11-year major league veteran. In fact, two of the Chiefs’ three quarterbacks are sons of 11-year big league veterans; third-stringer Shane Buechele is the son of former Rangers and Cubs third baseman Steve. (Unfortunately, I don’t know what Chad Henne’s father’s profession is.) Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

On a ballot that features one closer whose support from voters suggests he’ll eventually wind up in Cooperstown (Billy Wagner) and another who’s fourth all-time in saves (Francisco Rodríguez), it’s easy to forget that there’s a third one of note, particularly as he’s certain to receive less than the 5% of votes required to remain on the ballot. Huston Street carved a niche as an all-time collegiate great before becoming a first-round draft pick and an AL Rookie of the Year, one whose outstanding command, movement, and deception compensated for his comparatively moderate velocity (his sinker maxed out at an average of 92.5 mph in 2009). The combination carried him to a career total of 324 saves, 20th all-time — an impressive total considering he threw his last pitch a month before his 34th birthday.

In a 13-year career spent with the A’s, Rockies, Padres, and Angels (is that a West Coast bias?), Street made two All-Star teams but also 11 trips to the injured list. His slight-for-a-pitcher frame — he was listed at 6 feet and 205 pounds but by his own admission was around 5-foot-10 — couldn’t withstand even the rigors of throwing an inning at a time at high intensity for very long. “There was a reason I never lifted a bunch of weights in the middle of my career,” he told The Athletic’s Pedro Moura in 2019. “Because I was so fucking injury prone that I would get too tight.” Read the rest of this entry »