Rays Envy Applesauce: Playoffs Start With A Tampa Win, More 2011 Mets and Jose Reyes Fallout, Tim Byrdak Video Bombs

You’re all in my head, not the other way around.

Factoring in the injury tag, that’s what’s limiting realistic offers to a more reasonable five guaranteed years, instead of Crawford-like six or seven.

From where do you get that $15 million is fair value for Reyes?

(a little high, I think we can all agree, but it’s a nice, even number), that elevates our payroll from ~$80 million (factoring in arbitration raises for Pelfrey, Pagan and Parnell) to ~$100 million, leaving Sandy with ~$10 million to work with (given that I’m being conservative with my estimations of Reyes’ contract, and arbitration raises and stuff, it might be closer to ~$15 million in reality, something to note, even though I’m working only with ~$10 million).

With that ~10 million dollars, he’s going to have to sign a SP, a reliever or two, and a bench player or two. Looking at the available options on the SP market, and factoring in where the team is, in terms of developing impact prospects, it’s highly unlikely that Sandy goes out and signs a guy like CJ Wilson to a 4/$60 contract ($15 million a year) to begin with, even if the money was there. After him, the market drops precipitously. It’s more cost effective for the team to hang back, and sign a lower tier guy for a few million and minimal time- especially since we have the Four Horsemen in development and the pitching FA pool is a lot better next season. In terms of the bullpen, it is a buyer’s market, as there are a lot of late-inning relievers available, and a lot of them aren’t that dominant, or are semi-question marks. In terms of the bench, if we resign both Hairston and Harris (I’m not necessarily advocating that, but for the sake of simplicity I’m going to use them), they’d combine to cost $3 million or so- in other words, not very much. And, in regards to both the bench and the bullpen, we have a few in-house candidates who very likely will be around in 2012 that make the Major League minimum, or close to it.

All in all, because we don’t have too much that needs to be upgraded, and because of market factors and all, $10-$15 million dollars to address the things we need might be more than enough.

$1 year one

$100 million year 6