The Mets Should Give Cespedes Five Years

Apparently the Nationals are offering Yoenis Cespedes a five-year deal, while the Mets have no interest (reportedly) in going beyond three years. This seems to me an obvious mistake. At 5 years, $100 million (around where the Nationals' offer is believed to be), you're paying Cespedes to be worth under 3 wins above replacement per year. He's been in the Majors for four years. Yearly WAR totals, averaging Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs: 3.4, 1.9, 3.7, 6.5. It's tough to project this guy not to be at least something like a 3.5 win player, if not 4, and if he's that then 5/$100 is an entirely fair contract. Perhaps a bargain. And the funny thing about the reluctance to go longer-term is that the one big concern about Cespedes and the Mets disappears after 2017, because that's when Curtis Granderson's contract expires. At that point, you could quite naturally move Cespedes to right field rather than having to play him primarily in center, and he's a really good defensive corner outfielder.

And I don't actually buy that long-term payroll constraints, and the need to pay their young pitchers, will be that much of a problem. In 2020, the Mets will have the following players under contract at sub-free agency prices: Kevin Plawecki, Domonic Smith, Dilson Herrera, Amed Rosario (as well as several other shortstop types), Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, and (I think) Zack Wheeler. Now, none of these guys with the possible exception of someone like Smith or Rosario would still be making the league minimum; they'd all be in arbitration, many of them in their last round of arbitration. You'll also have David Wright on the books at $12 million that year, because his contract was middle-loaded. Put it all together and I just don't see how having Cespedes under contract at a pretty reasonable rate is going to be a problem for that team. Not if the payroll has actually risen back to a more ordinary level, after what looks like it should be a pretty prolonged period of the team's being really good.

So yeah, if the Nationals sign Cespedes to 5/$105 or something like that, that's just not gonna be okay, and the Mets' reluctance to go that far really does seem to signal that something remains deeply rotten with the team's long-term financial situation.