Obviously, to start with, he should be tremendously undervalued, so that you can get him for way less money than he’s worth. So he’s going to be a defensive wizard but ideally not one with a huge reputation as such. Baserunning value, which is almost never measured by anyone, would be nice, so let’s just make him the best baserunner (SB / CS excluded) in all of MLB, OK? So you’ve got a guy who projects to be a 5.0 WARP player next year (using Marcel on his EqA and splitting the diff between UZR and Plus / Minus and regressing them, too), but almost nobody realizes he’s anywhere that good.

Just to be silly, let’s say that he’s coming off a terrible post-season, which might depress his value a tick even though we all know it actually has no predictive value at all.

How far can we push this? If he’s going to play half his games in Safeco, how about if he gets absolutely no value at all from power, so that he has more value to you than almost anybody else?

Now I’m downright hallucinating, so let’s just say that he is also the best player on the team that won your division.

And just to be entirely ludicrous, thanks to the idiocy of Elias, he’s not even a type A!

Some joke, eh boss?

If the Mariners don’t make every effort to get this done, then I don’t see why anyone would ever sign a FA, period. It’s the biggest no-brainer in the world.

So while Dave had Ichiro’s 2010 salary at $18 M, the M’s are really only paying him $12 M according to Cot’s ($17 M annual salary minus $5 M deferred). I assume Dave realized this, but just preferred to include the money in the 2010 budget, rather than the 2013 (or whenever budget) for simplicity.

$18 million is the average annual value of the contract when you include the signing bonus, and without any reduction for the deferred money. Since we don’t actually know what rules the team is using to match payroll up against budget, simplicity has its virtues. Also, some systems would definitely require you to account for the deferred money now, since it’s an existing liability, not to mention that it does carry a not insubstantial interest rate. But I’ll leave the stupid accounting tricks for the Mariners’ annual report to the PFD.

something to consider…

Thanks for caring about the team/game enough to check in. Most folks only check in when they have something to bitch about.

Call me simple…

So while Dave had Ichiro’s 2010 salary at $18 M, the M’s are really only paying him $12 M according to Cot’s ($17 M annual salary minus $5 M deferred). I assume Dave realized this, but just preferred to include the money in the 2010 budget, rather than the 2013 (or whenever budget) for simplicity.

look here for the specifics.