While we don’t know the exact terms of the deal, we know its a big extension for a ton of money.
The good: The Reds will have what is likely to be one of the 5 best players in baseball over the next 5 years locked up.
The bad: The Reds may be hamstrung in the last 4 years of the deal by a former superstar taking up a ton of payroll for solid, but not superstar like performance and an inability to surround him with players to win because of the money Votto is making.
Dave Cameron broke it down on fangraphs, but here is the important part to me:
Given that he’s in his prime, we can probably sustain Votto as a +6 win player for three years before we project age-related decline, and then we’d accelerate the decline towards the end of his career when his skills are likely to disappear a bit faster. So, a projection for Votto over the next 12 years might go something like this:
2012: +6 WAR
2013: +6 WAR
2014: +5.5 WAR
2015: +5.0 WAR
2016: +4.5 WAR
2017: +4.0 WAR
2018: +3.5 WAR
2019: +2.8 WAR
2020: +2.1 WAR
2021: +1.4 WAR
2022: +0.7 WAR
2023: +0.0 WARTotal: +41.5 WAR
If we start at $5 million per win and apply the 5% future inflation to these expected performances, we’d get a total of $249 million over the next 12 years, almost exactly what the Reds just signed Votto for. But, again, that model is for free agents, and Votto was two years away from free agency. In other words, the Reds basically didn’t seem to get any kind of discount for taking on additional risk.
As he lays out, on a normal age progression, there is a ton of risk at the back end of that deal.
When I first heard about the rumors of an extension, my initial thought was “oh crap”. Not because I don’t think Joey Votto isn’t the egg mcmuffin of baseball players, but because I had a feeling that this is the kind of deal they were signing him to and that there is a ton of risks in it, much less for a small market team. This contract is going to work out just fine for the Reds over the next 5 years and hopefully we can hang a sixth banner at GABP in that time frame. But as much as I like having Votto around for that time, I wonder how much having him around at the latter part of this deal is going to hurt the team.
I am a Reds fan, so I want them to be good every year. Clearly this deal makes them better for 2014-2017, but beyond that I am very concerned it could actually make them worse.