After his monster season in 2013 where Carpenter led all of MLB in doubles and runs scored, he is not a very rich man.
Carpenter breakdown with #STLCards: $1.5M signing bonus, $1M, $3.5M, $6.25M, $9.75M, $13.5M, $14.5M, $18.5M club option or $2M buyout.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) March 8, 2014
Carpenter was an absolute monster last year for the St. Louis Cardinals and in my opinion, should have received more consideration for the NL MVP award because of his numbers, his ability to hit leadoff on a team that had no leadoff hitter and for changing positions to make his team better.
But even though Carpenter had a huge 2013, I still feel as though this contract extension was a bit premature.
Carpenter's 2013 was fantastic, but it is just one season, and considering the Cardinals still had three years of arbitration eligible control over the versatile infielder, the Cardinals may have been prudent to wait on extending the left-handed hitting stud and waiting to see if he could repeat his success.
Now, the other side of the argument would be that the price would go up if Carpenter once again had a monster 2014.
I would have been fine waiting though. The more known the commodity, the higher the price I would be willing to pay.
The Cardinals are also taking a big risk by how heavily weighted this contract is weighted on the backend.
Will Matt Carpenter be a $14.5 million player in 2019?
Who knows, it is too far away to predict.
Financially back-loaded contracts make sense. But that is a lot of money to guarantee to a player for a performance that is so far away.
General manager John Mozeliak has been aggressive of late and this signing of Carpenter is no exception. Mozeliak will have plenty of this type of work to do in the coming years with talented players such as Shelby Miller, Michael Wacha, Trevor Rosenthal and Oscar Taveras.
Another point to consider is the contract Allen Craig received last season from the Cardinals under similar circumstances, except that his contract was worth just over $30 million.
Is Matt Carpenter $20 million better than Allen Craig?
I am not sure that Carpenter is five bucks better than Craig. But it does signal a little bit about the future of this franchise.
The Cardinals value Carpenter very highly and are putting their chips in his basket pretty heavily as the franchise's cornerstone on the hot corner for years to come.
It is a smart investment by Mozeliak and the Cardinals, I just would have waited a few more months to buy-in.
I always love when real sports and fantasy sports writers alike say extrapolate those limited stats from whatever small time a young player played last season over a full season etc. etc. Yeah, this isn't referring to anything written in this article. It's from a December article about Matt Adams that I don't have the time or energy to look up cause I currently have not one but 2 terminal illnesses and my hands are killing me now typing this or typing anything ever online but I do it anyway. Having the problems I've had the past 2 years, with even more happening the past 6 months, I've not been able to go back and see what happened at the end of last season and therefore didn't know Adams' story. I was forced however to pay for him in a fantasy auction league at Yahoo since he was no better or worse for the money than anybody left that late that I had to choose from. I google newsed him and your article re-posted at Yahoo was the first to come up. I've been online since 1998 and you're about the 1998th person to say if a guy does all season this season what he did in a month or 2 last season he'll have a monster season only it rarely works that way and I mean rarely. I've also been online so long, long enough to know that when I come to a site where there's only one person writing anything, it's not of anything significance at all, and you're on sports radio, so are 10,000 other hacks when you're trying to fill 24 hours in 200+ cities and having a podcast doesn't change my opinion one bit either since about 9 million people now have a podcast. However, the fact that Yahoo is reposting you and calling you a contributor as if you're somebody is exactly why in 1998 I thought the net was the greatest thing ever and now think it's the worst. You're being given the same treatment as actual known for years sports writers by Yahoo and that's just a hilariously sad statement on what the net has become. I'll let you in on a few other secrets besides you can't project monster numbers based on 1 or 2 months worth of last season's stats. If a guy bats .250 for the season, he didn't go 1 for 4 in every game he played. If a pitcher strikes out 200 batters in 30 starts, he didn't strike out 6.666666 batters every start. Hilariously sad that a site with less than 1600 Twitter followers and a guy listened to by less people than that on radio I'm sure is having their crap posted on Yahoo like it's relevant opinion, describing you as owner/editor and you're the only one here. By that way of thinking I'm king of my apartment. Owner/editor Jesus Christ already. Just sad.
ReplyDelete