The fact that it IS a rebuild is why this shouldn't be a big surprise. If you look at where other teams were at the same time during their rebuilds, they were also losing a 100 games a season. Why is everyone surprised that this team is bad at this stage of a rebuild?
I am surprised by people who would spent a month complaining about the exact same thing, in the exact same way, though when you have people complaining about things from 40 years ago, I guess I shouldn't be.
The Sox can save a lot of money over that eight years if Eloy is anywhere near as good as he could be. For example if you overlay the Nolan Arenado first eight years, he is going to make just under $100 million. Harper and Machado would have similar numbers if you take their signing bonuses into account. Mike Trout is at $45 million for his first six years alone, plus the next two years at $34 million each to make $115 million for his first six years.
In six years that number could be even bigger as I expect that spending will pick back up over that time period.
When you factor in that the going rate for stars on the open market is somewhere between $25 and $36 million per season TODAY, that makes the savings somewhere between $15 and $35ish million over those two years. It could be even higher in 6 years.
I think it sends the message that he is only being called up because he was signed. I don't think the Sox want to send that message, since he was already sent down.
I mean every single thread ends up at the same dead end over Machado. Does everyone really want to have the exact same discussion every single day, especially now that there are even spring games to talk about? It gets grating.
I guessed exactly the years and structure when this discussion started, including guessing 6/39 for the first 6 years.
I am glad the option years will be significantly smaller than was initially thought.
As of today, this is it. Maybe in the next few months someone else pushes their way into this discussion, but there seems to be a clear top 3 as of March 20th.