User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
Vivid Seats is a sports ticket broker, concert ticket broker and theater ticket broker offering the best baseball tickets like Yankees tickets, Cubs tickets, and Red Sox tickets, as well as Police reunion tour tickets and Jersey Boys tickets. |
We have baseball tickets, the NFL schedule, college football tickets and Cowboys tickets. We have NBA tickets like Celtics tickets and Lakers tickets. Plus, buy Giants tickets, Patriots tickets and Colts tickets. Also check out our MLB baseball schedule |
Concerts Theatre NFL Angels Dodgers MLB Celtics Theater NBA Tickets Venues NHL Lakers Tickets NFL Yankees NHL Phillies NBA Wicked Marlins MLB Concerts Cubs Mets Red Sox Wicked WWE Red Sox Mets Yankees Dodgers |
Page rendered in 0.3938 seconds
81 querie(s) executed


Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
My qualms:
1. Assuming I still have faith in Chris Young (is he signed long-term?), Upton's future is as a RF. Being a stud RF is hard, you need to be putting up OPS+s around the 130 range. I'd take some convincing that's his future ... maybe not a lot but some.
2. You know this is coming. He's K'ing about 1 per 4 AB. You simply can't maintain that kind of BA (345 this year) when you do that. His on-contact numbers this season are 455/788 and that BA is not sustainable (and that's probably not, yet, his true talent for power on-contact either). What is it with these Uptons and their crazy on-contact BA numbers (BJ was 444 last year, a more believable but really good 385 this season)?
2a. Obviously he's young and that K-rate (which isn't awful) could improve. The point of 2 is that, at the moment, I'm thinking a BA of 280 is closer to what we can expect. He hasn't shown any walks yet (though that will increase if he keeps up that ISO) but, even with that ISO, you could be looking at a long-term line like 280/330/530 -- damn nice but hardly spectacular for a RF. So it really is a question of how much you think he will improve from here. If his K-rate and walk-rate improve, he's prime Cesar Cedeno (adjusted for era) and you sign him immediately if you can. If he doesn't, maybe Alfonso Soriano's career line (280/330/520 ... go figure) which would be average-ish for a RF. His downside would seem to be Joe Carter or Jeff Francoeur (who has greatly improved his K-rate so far this season) if the power isn't quite for real.
Anyway, barring major injury, I have very little doubt that Upton will be a starter for the DBacks for at least the next 5-6 years. Given that, he'll certainly make at least $18 M over his 3 arb years ... or it might be $24 by the time he gets to arb. Take a little discount for that injury/collapse risk and I'll buy those babies out. If he wants to give me some bargain FA years too or some higher-priced options on those years, I'll almost certainly bite. And, like I said, if I and my advisors were sufficiently confident that Cedeno is his future, I'll definitely try to buy out this year and 7 more.
And he should be thrilled with a deal like that. He'd have a nice guaranteed chunk of money and still be an FA following his age 27 season. Wow!
Chances are Justin Upton will be an extremely rich man.
Of course, young players and arb years have always been the biggest market inefficiency in the game (and it is a real market inefficiency). Teams have always recognized that, but some of these long-term deals have the potential to be hugely profitable to the teams. I think we might be seeing a real shift -- long-term "budget" deals with young players, declining interest (and salaries) for older FAs -- and the Union is going to have to do something, especially if revenues keep expanding.
I'm having intuitive problems with my own argument though, since it's hard to imagine, say, Cincinnati and Miami becoming so baseball-mad as to make up for losses in New York. Perhaps the total revenues would drop even if the % paid as salary didn't, which wouldn't be a good thing for baseball.
On a not-quite-related note, wouldn't the scarcity of free agents drive the price back up for the mediocre ones?
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main