MLB fans have noticed something interesting the past two offseasons. Star players who used to chase the largest total guarantee are now taking massive annual salaries on short commitments. Cody Bellinger did it. Alex Bregman did it. Pete Alonso did it. And more players are likely to follow as the market evolves.
But the most interesting part of this trend isn’t the player side at all. It’s how front offices are using these deals to reshape their competitive windows. And nowhere is that more apparent than in Queens, where the Mets have quietly become one of the clearest test cases for why short-term MLB deals actually work.
This isn’t about “being aggressive” or “going for it.” It’s about something more modern and more strategic: preserving roster flexibility, buying time for player development, and keeping future windows open while staying competitive today.
The Mets as the Lens
To understand why this matters, you have to go back to the summer of 2021. The Mets collapsed in July and August, and with no internal CF depth they dealt Pete Crow-Armstrong (PCA) for Javier Báez at the deadline. That wasn’t just a desperation trade. It was an admission that the CF pipeline was empty.
PCA wasn’t merely a prospect. He was the CF solution. Once he was gone, the Mets had no future CF player at all. When a team can’t develop a position, it extends the veteran instead of replacing him. That’s how Brandon Nimmo got his long-term deal. It wasn’t irrational. It was structural.
Meanwhile, Pete Alonso presented the inverse scenario. 1B/DH is a surplus position league-wide, easier to replace via development or short-term free agency. CF is a floor position. 1B is a ceiling position. Pipeline vacuum at CF → extend Nimmo. Pipeline optionality at 1B → don’t extend Alonso. Fans argued about feelings. The front office was modeling roster slots.
This PCA → Nimmo → Alonso chain is the backbone of the Mets’ move into the optionality era.
The Old Model: Long-Term, Mid-AAV Contracts
For most of the 2020s, MLB free agency revolved around long-term deals. Front offices justified 7-10 year commitments with a simple equation:
projected WAR × $ per WAR − contract cost
Buy enough wins up front to offset the decline years and hope the total package clears.
Under that model, if we look at two real recent cases:
Bo Bichette: 3 years, ~$126M (short, high AAV)
Brandon Nimmo: 8 years, $162M (long, mid AAV)
and assume ~$8M/WAR with an 8% discount rate (standard NPV), you get:
Both look mildly underwater. That’s normal for free agency. But this model misses the variable that actually matters.
The Roster Spot Has Value (This is Key)
Players don’t just produce WAR. They occupy roster spots, and those spots sit inside player development pipelines. When a club signs a veteran for 6-8 years, it isn’t just buying his production—it’s blocking the future.
If the organization expects to develop MLB contributors in the back half of that contract, the blocking penalty is real and expensive. If it doesn’t, the penalty collapses. Once you account for this, the NPV changes:
Suddenly the difference isn’t subtle. Long-term deals become constraint assets. Short-term deals become flexibility assets.
A Quick Visual
Here’s how player value and roster spot value diverge over time:
Brief explainer:
Player Value (blue) declines with age, regression, and injury variance. FanGraphs’ aging-curve work helps explain why the blue line behaves this way. (Thanks Tom!)
Roster Spot Value (orange) rises as internal talent matures, trade opportunities emerge, and external markets evolve.
Short-term deals (like Bichette’s) end before the divergence, preserving optionality.
Long-term deals (like Nimmo’s) extend into the divergence, where blocking penalties and negative ROIC seasons live.
Once those two curves separate, the roster spot becomes more valuable than the veteran occupying it. That’s the inflection point where short-term deals win and long-term deals start to hurt.
The Mets’ Bridge Strategy
This context reframes the Scherzer and Verlander signings. Those weren’t indulgences. They were bridge assets—short-duration, high-impact veterans used to keep the club competitive while the front office rebuilt scouting, player development, analytics, and MiLB infrastructure.
You can’t rebuild the machine and tank the product simultaneously. Cohen bought time, credibility, and development runway without committing the out-years of the roster.
Once the developmental engine started to turn, long-term commitments stopped looking like stability and started looking like liabilities.
Polanco → Robert → Paralta
Jorge Polanco at 2/$40M is the functional Alonso replacement contract. Not in likeness, but in geometry. It buys middle-order production without locking in decline seasons. It substitutes dollars for years. It keeps the out-years clean.
The same geometry applies to:
Luis Robert — CF elite defense, RH power, reasonable floor (defense) with high ceiling
Freddy Paralta — Rotation anchor for win-now team with future optionality to renew
These are the contracts clubs deploy when they refuse to punt a season but won’t sacrifice future roster efficiency. A subtle addition: many short-term deals now include player opt-outs, turning them into two-way hedges.
Even though the Mets got the trades they wanted in 2025-26, don’t be surprised if they default to this playbook again.
The CBA Hedge
Front offices aren’t naïve. The CBA expires after 2026. No one wants to be stuck holding six more years of a declining veteran when service-time rules, payroll accounting, and tax treatments are renegotiated. The ambiguity zone is expensive. Short deals terminate before that zone. Long deals don’t.
What to Watch Next
The question isn’t whether the Mets will “go for it.” They already are. The real question is:
How will the club allocate roster spots over time?
If development hits, long deals become liabilities. If it misses, long deals become necessities.
Short-term MLB deals work because they preserve optionality in a league where windows open and close faster, player development matters more, and the next set of rules hasn’t been written yet.
This is Hedge-Fund logic applied to Baseball economics.
10 comments:
Seems like Stearns is on the right track. I'm on board with his short and long term strategy.
Not following the Roster Spot Value curve. It doesn't seem intuitive that it would just increase linearly over time. There has to be an an asymptote, right?
Great question — and yes, the curve is illustrative, not literal.
Roster-spot value isn’t linear. It’s convex early, then flattens as optionality disappears. The asymptote you’re pointing to is exactly where long-term deals start to destroy flexibility rather than add certainty.
The point of the illustration wasn’t the math, it was the marginal effect: early years carry disproportionate strategic value, while late-year certainty offers diminishing (and often negative) returns.
In that sense, a true asymptotic curve actually strengthens the case for short-term, high-AAV structures.
Ray
I am a convert regarding Stearns though I think Polanco was a bad sign
In layman’s terms, long-term contracts are almost always binding the future first of all and Albatross’s in the out years. I was just discussing that with a friend this morning. Jose Reyes hit 290 at age 32 and 190 at age 35. Aging is difficult, especially when reaction time to faster pitching than ever before. Makes it more difficult to age gracefully.
Tom, notice the amount of contracts all expiring by 2028/2029? Polanco, Bichette, Roberts, Semien, can’t remember who else… it seems Stearns wants to reset the tax
This may be the best RVH piece yet, and that's saying a lot. I definitely think that Paul's question was great. In all my years as a Professor, I told my students that the hardest thing to do was to ask a really good question which I defined as one to which the answer would be genuinely illuminating. And that is exactly what happened in RVH's response
I come at much the same issues in a slightly different way in my series as it progresses. I will suggest in the 3rd post (unfortunately not the next one) several things: 1.long term contracts, 2.poor trades. 3 high cost signings of FA are all traceable to different shortcomings in the 3 aspects in which organizations can add value: player assessment, talent development, talent projectability. The last of these is the most difficult, the most consequential once you have a decent approach to the first two, but.also the one that requires the most creativity to help sort out. That's where I have some distinctive suggestions and where I explain a bit about what the Mets are doing.
Where RVH and I completely overlap is in framing what is going on inside the team as fundamentally about structural arrangements and reconceptualizing a lot of decisions in ways that most fans and an amazing number of organizations do not. I focus on risk management, including minimizing the sum of the costs of mistakes (too long a contract, e.g or eliminating your pipeline at a foundational position) and the costs of avoiding those mistakes. I come from the rational choice perspective (strangely as a critic of it -- at least as regards the way in which other scholars have attempted to extend its applicability in areas I have argued are not appropriate-- and from the insurance world -- as it plays out in a wide variety of domains -- and the incentives created around insurance).
My most brilliant student went on to run the insurance division of the Guggenheim Fund, some of the partners of which ended up as the majority owners of the Dodgers. I don't worry about their ability to manage risk, though as a Mets fan, I wish the team were still owned by the couple who couldn't stand one another. To me, those were the glory days. I also don't worry about either Cohen's or Stearns' ability to manage risk.
Another way of looking at the lessons over and over in what RVH brilliantly points out is the expression often used by economists: all costs are opportunity costs. Buy stability, the opportunity cost is flexibility. What is the value of each. Here's where I come in. What are the risks associated with each? How do you optimally distribute that risk? What information do you need to be able to make that determination? What mechanisms can you put in place to reduce your uncertainty or increase your confidence in the reliability of information you have? That's the space in which I am hanging out in my head these days
In case, I wasn't clear: this isn't just an excellent post; it is brilliant.
Jules — this means a great deal coming from you, especially framed the way you framed it.
You’ve put your finger on what I was hoping to surface but not overstate: that once you move past player assessment and development, projectability under uncertainty becomes the real frontier — and also the most dangerous place for organizations that don’t realize they’re guessing.
I think where our thinking overlaps most cleanly is exactly where you land it: risk distribution, not risk elimination. Buying stability, buying flexibility — those are not moral choices, they’re portfolio choices, and the mistake teams make is treating them as absolutes rather than trade-offs.
Your framing around minimizing the sum of the costs of mistakes and the costs of avoiding mistakes is especially sharp. That’s a lens fans almost never use, and frankly many organizations still don’t either.
I’m very much looking forward to where you take this in your third post — particularly around mechanisms that improve information reliability rather than just confidence. That’s where this conversation gets really interesting.
I do like this short term strategy but paired with heavy investment in the international free agent market starting with Pena, Asigen and I understand they have commitments for 2027. Smart to invest and do whatever is necessary to develop these international free agents in the farm system
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