So, yeah- they need to quit being dickheads if they get star young players and extend them for like 9 years 100M after year 1 if you want to keep these guys through their prime. Unfortunately, they always wait too long and then it's just not going to happen. The only guy on the roster that it makes sense to make a big offer to is Yainer Diaz- you could be like 10 for 100M right now dude- I dare you to turn down life changing money. You have to think the player isn't going to just become a fat lazy slob- but that's the only way to do a moderately valuable (to the team) extension and it involves not massively fucking them over up front. And- that only works for a guy in his mid 20's with 1 year of service time (Pena would have been another guy that might be open to a deal like that) the Correa types that are super young we see what happened in Seattle to get that kind of deal done.
My timeframe has always been- end of Alvarez contract. Load up and do whatever you do to be good through the time you have an MVP like that, along with cheap young pitching and a star catcher making not much money and go for 1 or 2 more rings in that 4 years. If that means giving a 6 year deal to a guy who will only be good for 3 or 4 more years, or a 10 year deal to a guy who will be great for 5 or 6 more years and then eating money and trading players away so be it. You can strip the payroll back down to 30M, eat shit on the back end of dead money to the tune of 100 or 200M over the lives of those deals and go back into tank mode for 2 or 3 years.
So- this year I would do something like:
Tucker- 10- 300m, Bregman- 10- 220M, Valdez- 8-200, Walker- 4-80M. Trade Presley. Trade Abreu (Jose) and Matthews to someone. Trade Montero and Shithead CF minor leaguer that's our #1 prospect that sort of sucks and LMJ and whatever other prospects that are worth 20M in surplus value.
Payroll
Catcher- 8M,
1B- 20M
2B- 25M
SS- 1M
3B- 22M
DH- 17M
OF- 40M
Utility- 5M
SP- 40M
BP- 35M
That's a 220M payroll, no dead money, and your prospects out the door of what- maybe 3 of your top 5 prospects?
Then- the plan would be at the end of 4 years I'd have Bregman at 6/130M left, Valdez at 5/125 left and tucker at 7/210 left. Figure I'd have to eat 150M to offload those 3 guys and my books would be sparkling clean to do another rebuild beyond that. That's how I'd long term fix it if I wanted to compete at a fucking boss level through the end of Yordan's contract.
Either that- or I'd trade Framber, Tucker, Pena, Caratini, Abreu (Bryan) for prospects, play Chas and Jake every day at CF and LF and hope I could move them at the deadline this year, play Whitcomb and Dezenzo every day and hope they get better, figure I've wasted a year of Yordans prime, audition every arm I have in the minor leagues, see what I've got, and see which of the minor league guys are keepers, which of the propsects I got in the Framber, Tucker, Pena, et al trades are keepers, and go spend as much money as I needed to in FA to plug holes that weren't filled by prospects for 26, 27 & 28 before Yordan, Diaz, Brown etc are all gone.
One or the other. We won't though and those 4 years won't see us with a legit 100 win type team. So, we are hoping for chip and a chair (which to be fair- does occasionally work).