Email a copy of 'Sonny Gray Open To Long-Term Deal With A's' to a friend
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By Steve Adams | at
Email a copy of 'Sonny Gray Open To Long-Term Deal With A's' to a friend
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A'sfaninUK
Yeah, that’s not how the A’s work. Especially with a pitcher.
johnsilver
Oakland does not very often get a chance to sign a franchise piece to a long term contract and this might just be a time, if Gray is willing here. Butler was different, that was an outright bad gamble from the start. If Beane can get Gray to sign something along the lines of, say 7y and 75-90m? Would think more than make Oakland happy for keeping Oakland fans happy.
A'sfaninUK
“Would think more than make Oakland happy for keeping Oakland fans happy.”
Yeah, that’s not how the A’s work. They simply do not care about keeping certain players to make the fans happy, they only care about making the 1-25 as strong as can be and winning.
The A’s do not sign home grown pitchers, never have never will. The only way they’d sign Gray would be to an ultra-team friendly deal so his trade value would be higher if and when he pitches well again, and then they’d trade him.
rocky7
Of course Gray is interested in a long term deal given his doubt that he’s already produced the best results he can give..
Who knows if Tommy John or any other career detour awaits so of course he’s willing to sign long term!
Is Beane that dumb to sign a guy coming off a disappointing season to a long term high money deal just to appease Oakland fans?
But that’s the ridiculous way pro sports works these days!
arc89
All A’s fans are hoping this happens but let’s not forget not to many pitchers have more than a 5 year window as a Ace. The A’s have no long term contracts other than Doolittle option years.
bdh617
Pretty sure every homegrown guy says something along these lines, and then they run to the Yankees, Dodgers, etc. who will pay them way more money than they’d ever need. But can you blame them? Gray just doesn’t want to seem like the bad guy when he signs with the Rangers for 7/200
RyanR
I think the A’s don’t work that way just because most players want more than what they can give. If Gray is willing to lower his price I’m sure the A’s will keep him.
A'sfaninUK
They never kept the Big 3, Gio, etc etc etc – they kept Eric Chavez of all people and he burned them by never actually playing for 5 years. I’d think they’d be more open to buying out FA years of Cotton, Holmes, Barreto and Chapman.
Ray Ray
I think you are underestimating how good Chavez was. He wasn’t just a random guy that they kept. He was among the best 25 players in baseball from 2000-2005. Neither the A’s nor Chavez had any idea the injuries that were to follow.. He didn’t burn them because that says he had some level of control over the situation. Just Another Uninformed Opinion, I guess.
A'sfaninUK
The A’s got burned by the Chavez deal, not by Chavez himself, that’s a fact that has influenced all their signings ever since, no matter how much your superiority complex wants to try and prove me “uninformed”.
There’s also the idea of not paying for decline years.
Once again, missing the overall point to argue minutiae, don’t ever change rayray….
bruinsfan94 2
If the A’s are making business decisions based on a deal from 2005 then they would be more awful then the D backs.. If Billy Beane is some genus as you make him out to be all the time, then why would he be thinking about something from 2005? It happens all the time, it sucks but it happens. Every team gets screwed, look at the D backs with Miller, or the Red Sox with Pablo S. Should the Mets never sign a player again because of Bobby B?
Gray is freaking 26 and would be fairly cheap right now.
The only one with one with a superiority complex is you Just Another Fan.
Your comments are just painful to read. Just narcissistic.
rycm131
One of the best 25? What league are you referring to? Chavez was awful and put up most of his numbers at the end of the year or in chunks when they didn’t need it. Offensively he was incredibly unimportant.
bruinsfan94 2
Chavez was not awful. He had five really good seasons. Unimportant? How is 270 30 home runs 100 rbis awful?And he was top 25 in MVP voting 3 times. Won six gold gloves. What a joke of a comment.
chesteraarthur
This is a really interesting case. Is there any information out there on what Gray would be looking to get in an extension? (I assume there is not)
Pitchers are volatile enough, you gotta wonder if even mild shoulder and forearm injuries would scare oakland off of any long term commitment to him. As the writer mentions, they really can’t afford to extend him and have him suffer injuries.
Sasha C. Handelman
Sadly it wouldn’t surprise me to see Gray traded to a contender (Boston,LAD..) Beane is famous for trading players at their peak to get better future players. Donaldson, Addison Russell. He got a great package for Hill/Reddick. So if Gray does sign long term great but I wouldn’t count on it
brandons-3
Donaldson wasn’t traded at his peak
tuna411
Except the A’s missed out on trading gray at his peak.
chesteraarthur
Addisson Russell was at his peak when they traded him? He also didn’t trade him for future players, he included him in a package for 1.5 years of Shark and .5 years of jason hammel.
notagain27
At this time I couldn’t see anyone trading a high value package for Sonny Gray. How can one tell if his troubles this year aren’t signs pointing toward Tommy John? He is a power pitcher with a high spin rate breaking pitch, but lacks the physical size of a prototypical power guy. I would be hesitant to sign him to a long term contract at this moment; too many unanswered questions.
A'sfaninUK
He’s not a power pitcher though, his K rate doesn’t agree with that and his FB tops out at 94 MPH. I’ve long said a pitchers size has nothing to do with anything at all other than to dumb old school scouts who are wrong often. Everything else you said might be true though. His other injuries might have happened due to him trying to hide a potential TJ injury, and throwing 5 different pitches takes a very high baseball IQ to execute.
Deke
A’s would be nuts not to sign him if they got him for cheap. He’s got huge potential outside and we all know that the A’s would just trade him when he’s at his peak.
If I were any player signing a long term deal with the A’s because I WANTED to be there, I’d demand a no trade clause (which they would never give). A’s are continually in a game of moving chess pieces around. They are kinda like that guy who is dating a different girl every week because he’s afraid of commitment! hehehe
Cubs_Fan31
I have a difficult seeing Gray accepting anything under 6 years and $150MM. If he were to accept something in the neighborhood of 6 at $70-$90MM then I would question the confidence he has in his own health.
Steve Adams
That extension makes no sense for any player that still has his arbitration years remaining. You’re valuing all six of those years like they’re free-agent seasons, when the very nature of arbitration means he’ll be making only fractions of his open-market value over the next three seasons.
If you use Lance Lynn as a comp — and their ERAs, innings totals and K/BB numbers are all similar through their first three seasons — Gray’s arbitration years would be worth $22MM. That might be aggressive, even, given his poor 2016 and lack of wins (which factor into arbitration prices).
But, for the sake of this comp, we’ll say his arb years are roughly equal to those of Lynn. That means at 6/150 the three free-agent seasons included would be valued at $42.8MM per year.
That’s not how extensions work. The $70-90MM over six years you referenced isn’t actually insane. That would peg his three free-agent years at $16-22MM per season. I’m sure his agents would deem the lower end of that spectrum too weak, and they’d probably try to top $100MM one way or another (be it via a fourth year or increasing the AAV), but $150MM over six years is never happening for a guy who is only first-time arb eligible.
Deke
Hey Steve. Have you ever seen any projections that looks at salary trends per position player over the years and then predicts what say a Tier 1 FA pitcher is likely going to command 5 years from now? Like let’s take Grienke is on $31 mil a year. 5 years from now. Would a pitcher of his caliber be worth $40 mil? So given a decline in skills $31 million a year might be what a tier 2 pitcher is worth.
Forget the numbers they are just examples. But wondering if that kind of thinking is factored in?
Do teams do stuff like that and take into account that even though they are paying them big money, 5 years from now 31 million might not be a huge amount of money??
Jeff Todd
This isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison by any means, but the Trout and Freeman extensions are two that come to mind where the player essentially got going-rate premium free agent salaries for their future FA seasons that were covered in the deal. That makes sense; after all, when a player actually reaches the open market, they aren’t able to command greater down-the-line rates based upon expected salary growth (which is all but impossible to predict, anyway). That’s all essentially baked into the calculus already.
sals029
Has any player ever said, not I’m not interested in a long term deal with my current team?
rocky7
Yes, you’re right sals029, especially coming off a year where results were sorely under performing..
Yep, 38-31 career, certainly looks like a 7 year, 100 million plus guy to me.
Wonder who the A’s will try to pawn him off to 3-4 years down with road when his size and results, plus his stuff doesn’t play to his pay!
Three years in the league and we’re already putting this guy in the Hall of Fame. Pathetic.
chesteraarthur
When his size doesn’t play to his pay? Is Sonny Gray shrinking?
bkwalker510
The A’s should avoid extending Gray at all costs.
Ace of Spades
For some reason, grays size and pitches remind me of lincecum. A short shelf life perhaps?
KillahAC
Just come to the Red Sox