And there it is. Just a few days after the rumors of a monster extension started swirling, the agreement is now in place, according to Jon Heyman.
Stanton, 25, gets $325 million from the Marlins on a 13-year extension, which is the largest deal in American sports history. He also gets no-trade protection and an opt-out after five years. Heyman expects that the deal will be announced this week at a press conference.
Ultimately, the deal doesn’t really change the landscape of baseball any more than it had already been changed in recent years. Smaller market teams – or miserly teams, if you want to characterize the Marlins that way – are increasingly flush with cash, and locking up their own players has become commonplace. This deal is a little larger than most, but the trend is clear. For the Cubs, I’m not sure this length of deal is ever going to make sense, but I guess you never rule anything out.
Adjusting for inflation, the deal actually isn’t any bigger than the one Alex Rodriguez signed with the Yankees – at age 32, mind you. Stanton is an elite, special player, and he’s in a special situation there in Miami. After years of accumulating ill will, the Marlins likely saw that they had to do something big to keep their most prized player in town.
Now we’ll see if the Marlins build around him, or if Stanton takes up 50% of their payroll for the foreseeable future. I’ll also be very interested to see the contract breakdown, and whether it’s heavily backloaded and/or includes deferred money.
It sure would have been fun to follow a Stanton trade season and/or free agency. Oh well. Maybe the Marlins will be looking to trade him in a year anyway.