BBTIA: Matschulat: Ian Kinsler’s Next Big Deal

The liberation of Arlington begins now! (oh…wait)

Said Kinsler of his situation: “I want to stay here. I was drafted by the Rangers, and I want to be a Ranger. You never know how long it’s going to take. I think the sooner the better for them, and the sooner the better for me.”

For all of the misled—though slowly disappearing—carping about Kinsler popping up too often and being a terrible baserunner and exhibiting bad body language and (my personal favorite) “not being a team player,” he’s quietly developed into one of the better second basemen of our generation, and could very easily be argued to be one of the three best second basemen in the game at the moment. Only two other second basemen—Chase Utley (25.9 fWAR) and Dustin Pedroia (23.0 fWAR)—have produced more wins above replacement by FanGraphs’ calculations from 2008-present than Kinsler’s 20.8 fWAR ... and by Baseball Reference’s reckoning, Kinsler has produced one of the best age 26-29 windows of any second baseman in baseball history…

...If you pointed a gun to my head right now and demanded that I tell you what I thought a reasonable deal might look like, I’d probably suggest tacking three years onto Kinsler’s existing deal at an average annual value of $17 million, which would handsomely compensate Kinsler while concurrently giving Texas a solid chance of earning some surplus value and, in effect, coming out “ahead” on the deal. Over the last 72 hours, though, I’ve found that my own definition of “reasonable” has been very much at odds with the Rangers’ definition, so perhaps I’m just barking up the wrong tree.