$90 million, 6 Years. Really?

Apparently the Marlins' opening offer to Reyes was $90 million spread out over 6 years. That's an average of just $15 million per year, vastly less than the nearly $26 million that Fangraphs says he's been worth, on average, in his four good years ('06, '07, '08, and '11), and barely more than the $11.5 million he was worth in a disappointing 2010. Now, here's the thing: legend has it the Mets are reluctant to go more than four years for Reyes. If that's a firm sticking-point, it's an idiotic one. Among other things, the expectation has got to be that five years from now this team will not be as hard-up for cash as it is right now. In other words, the marginal value of a dollar for the Mets is much higher now than it will be five years from now. The $15 million they might risk paying an aged or injured Reyes in 2017 will be worth a lot less to them than the $20 million they might pay him next year.

More to the point, this is a just-plain-low salary. Suppose the Mets are in the extreme willing to go to five years, and don't care as much about the dollar figure as about not exceeding five years. Well, if those five years have an average salary of $18 million, then the headline figure on the contract would be... $90 million. Add in some reasonable options for future years, maybe vesting if he stays really, really healthy in Year 5 and team or mutual if he doesn't, and you're talking about a contract that sees Jose Reyes' lifetime earnings be categorically higher than under the Marlins' offer. If you assume that a) Reyes will take the longest-in-years guaranteed contract he can find, and b) the Mets are categorically unwilling to match a six-year offer, then yeah, this blows the Mets out of the water. But a) would be a slightly strange principle on which for Reyes to be operating, and at the very least there's no reason to assume it must be true.