The free-agent money might be flowing hard and fast, but many clubs are still treating the Competitive Balance Tax like a hard salary cap. Now, they’re resorting to similar tactics that NHL clubs u…
recently received 11-year contracts from the Phillies and Padres, respectively. All of the shortstops switched teams as free agents, and that’s a new thing. Fernando Tatís Jr. signed a 14-year contract with San Diego in 2021, which merely extended his tenure with his current employer. Julio Rodriguez’s option-laden 13-year deal can max out at 18 years; the Seattle Mariners clearly liked what they saw from their rookie center fielder.
Although this is something we haven’t seen before in Major League Baseball, it bears a strong resemblance to the NHL, and the summer of Ilya Kovalchuk ― a talented hockey player in his prime who is still costing the New Jersey Devils a quarter-million dollars a year. The parallels are so strong, it bears asking whether MLB will eventually disallow contracts of a certain length and structure, like the NHL did 12 years ago in response to Kovalchuk’s 17-year contract with the Devils.
The upshot: entering the 2020-21 season, at age 37, Kovalchuk could retire and leave a relatively small sum of money on the table. New Jersey would be off the hook for the downside of Kovalchuk’s career, even though those seven seasons had effectively been freeing up space under their salary cap for a decade.
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