The Toronto Blue Jays represent Major League Baseball’s only team in outside of the United States and now they have inked up the leagues best Canadian born talent. The Blue Jays and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. have agreed to a 14-year $500 million contract extension as reported by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal.
CBS Sports’ Dayn Perry provided more context to the 26-year-old star’s meteoric contract extension.
“Guerrero’s deal is the third-biggest contract in MLB history,” wrote Perry. “Trailing just Juan Soto’s $765 million free-agent deal with the New York Mets and Shohei Ohtani’s $700 million free-agent contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers.”
The signing breaks Mike Trout’s record for the largest contract extension in MLB history, and includes a no-trade clause and absolutely no deferrals.
Long Awaited Conclusion
The drama following the contract talks with the Blue Jays’ homegrown talent reached it’s boiling point during the first week of Spring Training, wrote MLB.com’s Keegan Matheson.
“Guerrero’s contract drama has hung over the Blue Jays for years now,” the reporter wrote. “But that spotlight grew brighter when Guerrero arrived in Spring Training with a deadline of February 18 — the first day of full-squad workouts — as a deadline for negotiations.”
Regardless of the metaphorical ‘deadline’, discussions of the contract extension only only grew hotter as the player gained more media attention.
“A story of this magnitude doesn’t go into hibernation,” continued Matheson. “And it only grew throughout camp as numbers and valuations leaked out, often in Spanish-language interviews from Guerrero himself.”
Though there are many other teams across the league that have both the money to sign the superstar and a shared interest in doing so, Blue Jays’ president Mark Shapiro’s confidence never wavered.
“I recognize it’s special when you have a player who was signed, developed, came to the big leagues and played his whole career with one team,” Shapiro said in an article published by Matheson on February 18th. “That was — and is — our hope for Vladdy.”
Response Around The League
For the most part, the uncertainty regarding the length and commitment of funds is out weighed by the understanding that the chance to secure a super star long term does not come around often.
“Put yourself in the quarter zip and khaki pants of the Blue Jays’ top executives,” hypothesized CBS Sports’ R.J. Anderson. “You have ownership’s consent to make a splash, but you know that 1) you keep coming up short on marquee free agents; and 2) the number of defensible top targets will be sparse for the next few winters. Can you see why you’d be willing to go big — really big — to keep your homegrown, second-generation star in place?”
USA Today’s Gabe Lacques views this contract as both a win for the Blue Jays and opportunity to prove to other small market teams that you have to spend money to make money.
“Naturally, the lower-revenue clubs may struggle to retain stars a little more,” Lacques wrote. “Yet so many have scarcely tried, and come nowhere near leveraging their greatest resource – talent – to both build a fan base and buttress their franchise value.”
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