Carl Crawford, Cliff Lee, and Jose Reyes

I've seen several articles making the argument that the Carl Crawford deal means that Jose Reyes will not be a Met long-term. The argument goes like this: if Reyes isn't back to form in 2011, he's leaving anyway, and if he is up to form, now that there's a precedent for giving Crawford-esque people $142 million deals, and given that Jose Reyes is a hell of a lot better than Carl Crawford when playing at potential, he'll command way more money than Sandy Alderson and the Mets will have any reason to give him. asda

But there was another contract precedent set recently. Cliff Lee decided to play in Philadelphia, rather than New York or Texas, despite the fact that the Phillies were offering him decidedly less money ($40 million less) than the Yankees were. I've also heard people saying that this is an example of free agency at its best: players choosing to play where they want to play, not just being sold to the highest bidder with essentially no personal discretion. Doesn't that latter description sound a little bit like slavery? If a player is not free to choose to play for Team X instead of Team Y despite the fact that Team Y is offering more money, then it's not free agency after all, it's just a different kind of corporate ownership of the players.

The point of all of this is that I think we have reason to believe that Jose Reyes likes being a Met. I think he likes New York. He lives in New York, with his wife. He's said he wants to keep being a Met. Etc., etc. When people say Reyes will command a contract of size X, what they mean is that there will be teams willing to give him a contract of size X. That doesn't mean he's obliged to take that contract. The Mets probably have a lot of intangibles working in their favor vis-a-vis Jose Reyes, which should let them sign him to a smaller contract than anyone else would (though still making him so obscenely wealthy that neither he nor his foreseeable descendants will ever need to work [except by playing shortstop!] for money).

It's like the situation with the Yankees in reverse: in that situation there were reasons why the Yankees would inevitably give their aging, not-very-good-anymore shortstop a bigger contract than he was worth, and why he both would have to accept it and would be a fool not to. In this situation, the Mets might find themselves able to get Jose Reyes, a player at the absolute top of the league in terms of talent, under medium-long-term control for below market value, because he wants to play here. That sounds like a win-win to me.

So if one of the long-term repercussions of Cliff Lee's signing with the Phillies is that players become a little more willing to engage in free agency, rather than automatically selling themselves to the highest bidder, and that makes Jose Reyes spend his entire career as a Met, then thank you, Phillies.