Friday, April 18, 2008

The Rays Pay Longoria

No doubt smarting from the snarky bloggers who criticized them for farming Evan Longoria out of camp in order to freeze the arb clock, Tampa Bay is on the verge of commiting $17.5-44M bucks on him over anywhere from six to nine years:
Rookie third baseman Evan Longoria and the Tampa Bay Rays agreed Friday to a $17.5 million, six-year contract, a deal that could be worth up to $44 million over nine seasons. Tampa Bay has a club option for 2014 and a second option that covers 2015 and 2016.

From debut to set-for-life in the span of six days has to be some sort of record, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, Prince Fielder just took a night job stocking shelves at Whole Foods to make ends meet.

(link via ShysterBall reader Jacob Lee)

7 comments:

dubbschism said...

whole foods has great vegetarian ingredients.

Alex Brissette said...

Hey yeah, that's a tough job, stocking shelves -- it might even lose some weight for him.

Anonymous said...

Isn't it a bit premature to be for a lower revenue team to be signing this guy long term? I mean, I know he's a super-stud prospect, but he could be a bust, or perhaps more likely, suffer a career-ending injury. And what was the point of sending him down to the minors if they were going to tie him up anyway? Those crazy Rays...

And yes, Prince must be absolutely fuming.

Eric Toms said...

Well, this surprised me ( and like all of us I've been following this trend ). 6 guaranteed years after how many big league ABs? Anon is right, this new approach is bound to blow up in somebody's face at some point...which doesn't necessarily make it a bad strategy.

What's Voros think?

I keep thinking about Andy Marte. Remember when he was one of the "it" prospects? ( He still might flourish ).

Alex Brissette said...

It would be really cool if Marte still turned out to be a star. I wonder, though, what effect on his mind his career arc has had on him. It's gotta be tough. I mean, sure, this happens to a lot of guys, to be declared a future star and then flame out in the bigs. So I wonder how many were told to be "can't miss" prospects, struggled and were dismissed, then came back and had a good big league career. Anyone?

Anonymous said...

^Brandon Phillips comes to mind

Anonymous said...

Pete,

I have a blog post about it up at Baseball Digest Daily.