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Originally Posted by Cinnamon J. Scudworth
I think you have it backwards. The economics of baseball say that the team tends to get more value out of a contract if they can sign a player to a long-term deal before he hits the last years of arbitration eligibility. "Veteran sluggers" are always a comparatively worse deal for the team no matter how rich the club is.
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Sure. But if you're the Dodgers or the Phillies and looking to contend now, the goal isn't to get value in terms of production per-dollar, it's to get max production, period, efficiency be damned. They'd prefer to have cost-controlled players, but if they don't have them, they can look to buy what they need. Small-market teams are much less able to do so. If the DH had been implemented in the NL this offseason, Nelson Cruz and Delmon Young and a few others would have suddenly found themselves much more in demand, and the price would have been prohibitive for some teams. Those teams would mostly be the small-market clubs.
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Now, long-term deals are always a gamble, but the problem for NL teams is that locking down a player like Joey Votto means an extra gamble about the continuing viability of his fielding. So small market NL teams are disadvantaged precisely in an area where they should be looking for an advantage.
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Uh, so ... we agree?