Article: Blue Jays Make an Opening Day Offer to Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

[Davy Andrews]

Although Guerrero's window for negotiation a possible contract extension was said to have closed when he reported to spring training, the Blue Jays clearly think they can still get a deal done now.

And the saga continues. On Thursday, just hours before the Blue Jays played their season opener against the Orioles, ESPN’s Buster Olney announced that the team had made another contract extension offer to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Guerrero is entering his final year of arbitration in Toronto, and he set a very public deadline for negotiations, cutting them off when he reported for spring training. The agita surrounding Guerrero’s situation (not to mention Bo Bichette’s similarly unresolved contract situation) has not necessarily been ugly, but it has been very public and somewhat disheartening. This latest news indicates that the Blue Jays are still holding out hope that they can get a deal done early this season, and it explains the extremely sanguine public comments Ross Atkins made on Wednesday, “I have hope. That’s how I feel.” While fans will be both relieved and encouraged to know that the team is still trying, the report definitely cast a shadow on Opening Day, making Guerrero’s contract situation even more of a story during an otherwise celebratory occasion.

Not long after Olney’s report, Héctor Gómez reported that the offer would be for 14 or 15 years and somewhere between $550 and 600 million. Gómez didn’t mention anything about deferred money, but the offer must have included some deferrals. Otherwise, it was almost certainly for more than Guerrero had requested. The deferrals are the whole ballgame here, as they lower both the present value of the deal and the average annual value for competitive balance tax purposes. Unfortunately, without knowing about the deferrals, those numbers don’t actually give us much new information.

During an interview a few weeks ago, Guerrero made it very that he was looking for 14 years and somewhere between $500 and 550 million dollars in present value. Previous reports indicated that the Blue Jays had offered him $500 million, but with deferrals that reduced the present value to between $400 and 450 million. That left a gap of somewhere between $50 and 150 million, and on a per-year basis, that doesn’t sound like a lot. Would the Jays really let Guerrero walk because of $3.6 to 11 million, the amount they might pay a reliever in any given year? That said, I’d remind you that sometimes the difference between a decent team and playoff-caliber team absolutely is $10 million. Maybe that’s the difference between signing another star player and settling for a league-average player. Or maybe it really is just one reliever. Just last season, the Mariners got only 1.7 fWAR from their relievers, fifth-worst in baseball, and they missed the last Wild Card spot by one game. Signing just one decent reliever could’ve been the difference between success and failure.

Clearly, the offer the Blue Jays just made has trimmed the gap between them and Guerrero even further, but it’s important to keep in mind that Guerrero’s original asking price was extraordinarily large. I broke this down at the time, but Guerrero is basically asking to be paid the way one of the five best players in all of baseball would be paid on the open market. As great a hitter as Guerrero is, he’s closer to a top-30 talent, and he’s not yet on the free open market. This is likely one reason that MLB.com’s Keegan Matheson predicted that Guerrero would end up signing with the Blue Jays, but only after the season ended. Aside from a desire to tamp down the drama, it’s just not particularly clear why the team would pay top of the market prices without being forced to by the actual market. That’s not really what extensions are for.

For right now, Atkins’ comments and this recent offer make it abundantly clear that the team feels that they’re close enough to get a deal done now. As frustrating as the insistence of the Shapiro-Atkins regime that every expenditure meet and extremely rigid valuation framework can be, it’s designed to keep the team from making big mistakes. A contract this large for one player is a big swing, and the potential for it to be either a huge success or a huge failure is very real.  

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