Jays avoid arbitration with Bo Bichette
Just a quick one on Bichette's new deal: a likely three-year, $33.5 million pact that may not be the extension we wanted, but perhaps is the extension we deserved...
The Blue Jays and Bo Bichette have avoided arbitration — not just this year, but next year and the winter after that as well, coming to terms on a three-year contract expected to be in the $33 million range. With the new deal in place, the timeline for Bo’s free agency hasn’t shifted, but hopefully some of the conversation surrounding it will.
Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith was first to report the news.
He also has a source that suggests what the terms of the three-year deal will actually look like — though it has neither been confirmed nor been made official.
So, unless there are some crazy Chad Green options involved — fingers crossed that there are and I have to append this post! — this seems to be what the next three years of Bo’s salary will look like. The Jays can now focus on finding common ground on an extension with him, rather than gearing up for arbitration hearings every year.
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Salary arbitration stories make excellent grist for the content mill during the depths of January and early February, but rarely do they end up remotely interesting. Hell, even when they are interesting — like when Marcus Stroman popped off on the Jays into the social media void after losing his case back in 2018 — they really aren’t. For all the sweating Jays fans did about hurt feelings and a potentially fractured relationship, a little over year later Stroman was angry — not about whatever came up in front of the arbitrator, but because the Jays hadn’t offered him an extension and instead dealt him to the Mets. The arb thing was a non-issue.
It can be a process that gets a bit ugly, but these are professionals and in the grand scheme it just doesn’t matter all that much — or signal much, if anything, about where a relationship between a club and a player is headed. Or, at least, not to the degree that all the dead-of-winter chatter makes it seem.
I would contend that this was true when it came to Bo Bichette and the Blue Jays before Tuesday night — when news broke that, instead of heading to an arbitration hearing on Thursday, the two sides had agreed on a muiti-year deal — and that it’s true after. The Jays weren’t headed into some kind of a nightmare scenario by having to take their case against Bo to an arbitrator and not just paying him what he wanted, and therefore, by extension, they haven’t avoided some kind of a nightmare scenario now that the issue is settled. This stuff just really isn’t that interesting.
The perceived drama of it, that is.
What is interesting, however, is the financial side of the deal. That is, after all, what the arbitration process is actually all about.
For those unfamiliar, if an arbitration-eligible player and his team can't agree on his salary for the upcoming season before the filing deadline (this year January 13th), each side submits a number (informed by years of precedent set by other players' arbitration cases) to an arbitrator. If the two sides ultimately go to trial, the arbitrator will choose one number or the other — the team’s number or the player’s. There's no meeting in the middle once you get to that point.
There is, however, time between the filing deadline and the hearing date during which negotiations can continue, but many teams — the Blue Jays among them — opt for a "file and trial," approach. This means that they won't negotiate one-year salaries after the filing date, but they will remain open to negotiating multi-year deals.
In this case, the Jays filed at $5 million, while Bichette filed at $7.5 million. Had the two sides gone to trial, whichever number the arbitrator chose would have become the baseline for Bo’s salary the following two years. And because of the way arbitration salaries escalate each year, the difference was actually quite a bit larger than it probably looked.
For example, Carlos Correa's Arb1 salary with the Astros was $5 million (because he won his case, with Houston having filed at $4.25 million). The next year he went up to $8 million, and the year after that it was $11.7 million.
Trea Turner, on the other hand, was a Super Two, which meant that he got to arbitration a year early. But in his second of four trips through the process — i.e. when he was three years from free agency, as Bo is now — he got a salary closer to what Bo was looking for this year: $7.45 million. His salary then went to $13 million, and then $21 million.
Now, in addition to Turner’s Super Two status there are differences between those two players, and their performances, that account for some of that salary difference. Correa only played 75 games in 2019, then had a weird down year at the plate in the shortened 2020 season, so his figures look lower than you might expect. But you get the idea. Correa started out at $5 million and got about $25 million total over his final three years before free agency; Turner started at $7.45 million and ended up making $41.5 million.
Had Bo won his case and continued producing like he has thus far in his career it would have cost the Jays a lot more than the $2.5 million difference between numbers filed. And, had he won, it would have also had a major effect on the salaries of future arbitration-eligible shortstops, because — as I said — this stuff is all based on precedent (not to mention somewhat arcane statistical benchmarks — home runs, games played, etc. — which is why someone like Matt Swarz is able to provide MLB Trade Rumors with consistently accurate, reverse engineered arbitration salary projections each year).
On the other hand, as we can see in the salary figures for Correa — or Javier Báez, who went from $5.2 million to $10 million to $11.65 million because of a huge statistical drop-off in 2020 — there would have been risk in the process for Bo too. Win or lose, but especially lose.
So, naturally, the solution for both sides here was to split the difference. The expected $33.5 million deal Bo will receive lands quite nicely between the $25 million or so Correa and Báez made, and the $41 million that Turner did, doesn’t it?
Of course, that’s not all that both sides are getting out of this deal.
Given the kinds of worries fans have had about why an even longer extension hasn’t been forthcoming, I suppose it’s good to see that Bo’s camp and the Jays have been able to find some financial common ground. It’s good to know that Bo actually can be tempted by a little bit of financial security and isn’t necessarily hellbent on betting on himself at every juncture. It’s good for the Jays that they now have a little bit of additional cost-certainty going forward. It’s good that, because MLB’s luxury tax calculations use average annual value instead of year-by-year salary, the Jays have willingly added to their tax bill in order to get the deal done.
It’s good that we won’t have to have this same conversation the next two winters!
Does it matter a whole lot more beyond that? Not really. But maybe all that is plenty good enough.
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All fair comments. I just wish they were prepared to go more for the Alex Anthopoulos route. I realuse that ownership has been more supportive of loosening the purse strings over the past few years, but I find it hard to believe they'll turn into the LA Dodgers North any time soon when it cones to paying out megs contracts for all 3: Vladdy, Bo, AND Manoah.
My understanding was the incentive for the player to sign a long-term pre-FA extension was to manage risk - give up the possibility of a bigger payday in FA for the cash certainty in case of injury, underperformance, etc.
Does it still make sense for him to consider an extension with this contract in place? Does an extension have to increase the payout in what would have been his arb years beyond what he's currently guaranteed?
Or do you see the negotiation of an extension now becomes primarily about what the FA-buyout looks like and is basically just as likely (maybe easier, because the arb years have been sorted, if we're saying they don't need to be re-opened)?