Last week Giancarlo Stanton’s signed the biggest contract in sports history, agreeing to a 13-year deal with the Marlins that will net him $325 million dollars. The contract has an opt-out clause following the 2020 season. It also has a team option for 2028, where the Marlins will either pay Stanton $25 million to play for them, or $10 million to go somewhere else.
Before we evaluate this deal, we can simplify it a little bit.
The opt-out clause is easy to dispense with: if Stanton exercises his opt-out in 2020, this contract will have been an absolute success. The deal is back-loaded: Stanton receives just $107 million over the first six years of the deal, which is an average annual salary of $17.8 million. If he decides to opt out after the 2020 season, he will be opting out of the less attractive back-half of the contract because other teams will want to pay him more than the Marlins would owe him.
We can probably ignore the option year, too: the $15 million dollar difference between the buy-out and the team option is going to mean very little when we’re all flying around on our hover-boards in the Year 2028. Let’s simplify it and assume that the Marlins will just take the $10 million dollar buy-out.
So we’re looking at a 13-year contract in which Stanton will be paid $335 million dollars.
How do we evaluate that?
* * *
We can start by asking what players are comparable to Giancarlo Stanton.
Baseball-Reference has a list of comparable: they have a ‘Similarity Score’ which is meant to tell us what players are most similar to Stanton at his current age. According to that metric, the most similar player to Giancarlo Stanton is Juan Gonzalez.
Does this pass the smell test?
Juan Gonzalez was a fine hitter for a long time, but it’s difficult to think of him as truly ‘similar’ to Stanton, never mind the most similar player we can find. Like Stanton, Gonzalez hit an impressive number of homers in his young days. But Stanton, over comparable playing time, has drawn twice as many walks as Gonzalez. Stanton strikes out more frequently than Gonzalez. Stanton has stolen bases at a 75% clip (30 for 40), while Gonzalez was at 56% (14 for 25). Stanton, playing in an era of decreasing offense, is a better hitter than Gonzalez: his OPS+ is 144, better than Gonzalez’s 130.
Stanton’s Adjusted OPS, or OPS+, is better than all of the ‘similar’ players cited on Baseball-Reference. This seems like a red flag: by one reasonably good measure of hitting prowess, Stanton’s being compared to lesser players.
And some of them don’t quite work. Andruw Jones is cited as one of his comparable players: I assume most of you remember the young Andrew Jones, and I’ll hazard that most of you can figure out the many ways he’s dissimilar to Giancarlo Stanton. Jones was a pretty good hitter, but he wasn’t at the same level as Giancarlo Stanton. And Jones was a superlative defensive centerfielder, maybe the best of all-time. Giancarlo Stanton makes some good plays, but he’s not on the same planet as Andruw Jones.
Bob Horner is another ‘similar’ player to Giancarlo Stanton. Bob Horner was a masher: he was similar to Giancarlo Stanton in his capacity to hit a baseball a good distance. But Horner was a poor base runner, and his defense declined pretty quickly. He was a good contact hitter: he didn’t strikeout that much. He didn’t walk too much, either. He aged quickly: his career, aided by the GM collusion of the mid-1980’s, ended very quickly.
You tell me, those of you who remember Horner, and know Giancarlo Stanton. Do they seem similar to you?
Of course they don’t. Bob Horner was a talented hitter, and it is a shame that his career wasn’t allowed its natural path. But Bob Horner on his best day wasn’t near the player that Giancarlo Stanton is.
So we need to find comparable players to Stanton. I wanted to find ten players who were similar players to Stanton at a similar age, and see how their futures panned out.
I started with the question of what kind of player Giancarlo Stanton is. As I see it, Stanton has the following characteristics:
-He is a terrific power hitter (Slugging percentage of .540, Isolated Power of .269).
-He is a disciplined hitter (12% career walk rate, .364 on-base percentage).
-He’s not afraid of the whiff (28.1% strikeout rate).
-He’s an elite offensive player (143 wRC+ (Weighted Runs Created)
-He is an outfielder who is neither great nor terrible on defense, and,
-He is not significantly detrimental as a base runner (30-for-40 in steals).
-All of this adding up to a pretty good player (4.7 rWAR/162 games played).
I put together a spreadsheet of all good players through the age of 24, and started culling the list back. I won’t take you through all of the steps in the process, except to say that I was looking for players whose rate stats seemed the most comparable to Stanton’s.
Because my intention was to see how we could expect Stanton to produce over the duration of his contract, I had to cut out one active player whose rate stats were very close to Stanton’s. In case you think I might be slanting this article in favor of Stanton, I’ll mention that that other player was another one-time Marlin, Miguel Cabrera. Miggy, through his Age-24 season, was very similar to Stanton:
Name
|
G
|
HR
|
BB%
|
K%
|
ISO
|
SLG
|
wRC
|
fWAR
|
Cabrera
|
720
|
138
|
10.5%
|
19.3%
|
.205
|
.542
|
139
|
20.0
|
Stanton
|
634
|
154
|
12.0%
|
28.1%
|
.229
|
.540
|
143
|
19.5
|
Because I went through the trouble of putting it in a table, it’s worth mentioning that Giancarlo Stanton looks a lot like Miguel Cabrera at point in his career. I can’t imagine too many teams that would’ve regretted having Age 25-37 Miggy. If you’re a believer in FanGraph’s version of WAR, Stanton has actually been slightly better than Miggy, tallying the same approximate WAR in a little less playing time.
But Miguel Cabrera is not on our list. Who is?
Name
|
G
|
BB%
|
K%
|
ISO
|
OBP
|
SLG
|
rWAR/162
|
wRC+
|
Rocky Colavito
|
383
|
13.5%
|
14.4%
|
.265
|
.377
|
.544
|
5.2
|
149
|
Ralph Kiner
|
296
|
13.8%
|
15.3%
|
.259
|
.383
|
.541
|
6.1
|
144
|
Reggie Jackson
|
490
|
12.8%
|
25.5%
|
.245
|
.357
|
.495
|
5.3
|
144
|
Frank Robinson
|
735
|
10.2%
|
13.5%
|
.253
|
.380
|
.552
|
6.5
|
143
|
Gian. Stanton
|
521
|
12.0%
|
28.1%
|
.269
|
.364
|
.540
|
4.7
|
143
|
Darryl Strawberry
|
516
|
12.7%
|
23.5%
|
.248
|
.356
|
.508
|
4.3
|
139
|
Manny Ramirez
|
402
|
12.7%
|
18.4%
|
.255
|
.385
|
.550
|
3.2
|
134
|
Boog Powell
|
686
|
11.4%
|
18.1%
|
.215
|
.351
|
.481
|
3.0
|
133
|
Jose Canseco
|
568
|
9.0%
|
23.0%
|
.233
|
.339
|
.503
|
4.1
|
132
|
Jack Clark
|
596
|
10.3%
|
13.1%
|
.204
|
.351
|
.482
|
4.7
|
131
|
Duke Snider
|
541
|
8.6%
|
14.3%
|
.207
|
.353
|
.497
|
4.4
|
121
|
I like this list a lot. I didn’t really pay attention to the names until I had whittled it down, and I was happy with the results. Darryl Strawberry seems like a great comparable to Stanton. So does Reggie Jackson.
But what I like about the list is that it has players I absolutely wouldn’t have thought of. Jack Clark, for instance: I would never have thought about Jack Clark as a comparable to Giancarlo Stanton. I remember a big portion of Jack Clark’s career, but I just wouldn’t have thought of him. Rocky Colavito, a player whose career I have no memory of, wouldn’t have registered.
And I’m pleased by some of the more quixotic players. Jose Canseco is on the list: while he’s probably not mentioned in whatever brochure Giancarlo Stanton’s agent put together to sell the Marlins on this contract, Jose Canseco is such an obvious comparable: both men are big, muscular players who are surprisingly quick. Giancarlo Stanton doesn’t seem slow….Jose Canseco didn’t seem slow in his heyday.
And Manny! Of course, Manny. He doesn’t show up on Stanton’s ‘similarity score’ list, but Manny is a goodparallel to Stanton.
I’m also happy at how frequently Stanton ends up smack-in-the-middle of these categories: he’s right in the middle in WAR/162 games played…five are ahead of him and five and behind him. He’s in the middle in FanGraph’s great wRC+. He’s in the middle in walk percentage. He’s in the middle in on-base percentage. He’s in the middle in slugging percentage. Though we’re swinging in the dark a little bit, the fact that Stanton winds up in the middle of most of these rate categories seems a good sign.
He ranks first in strikeout rate, but this is a little misleading. The major league strikeout rate in 2014 was 20.4%. Back in 1951, when Duke Snider was Giancarlo Stanton’s age, the major league strikeout rate was 9.7%. When Jack Clark was twenty-four, the major league strikeout rate was 12.5%. Giancarlo Stanton’s strikeout rate seems like an outlier, but viewed within the context of his era, he’s not out of line with most of the players listed. He’s also ahead of the pack in Isolated Power, though this, too, isn't adjusted for league and park contexts.
It’s a good list. If you want to project what Stanton’s next thirteen years will look like, this is a good list of players to use.
So let’s see how they did. In what areas did they improve, and in what areas did they decline?
We’ll look at fWAR, first, to get a general sense of how we can expect Stanton to age:
Player
|
War per 162 Games
|
War per 162 Games
|
Name
|
Rookie to Age 24
|
Ages 25-37
|
Rocky Colavito
|
5.2
|
3.6
|
Reggie Jackson
|
5.3
|
5.0
|
Ralph Kiner
|
6.1
|
5.3
|
Manny Ramirez
|
3.2
|
5.4
|
Jose Canseco
|
4.1
|
3.4
|
Jack Clark
|
4.7
|
4.1
|
Frank Robinson
|
6.5
|
6.4
|
Duke Snider
|
4.4
|
5.2
|
Darryl Strawberry
|
4.3
|
4.3
|
Boog Powell
|
3.0
|
3.1
|
Exactly one player, Rocky Colavito, saw his fWAR per 162 games decline markedly after he turned 25. He had been a 5-win player prior, but was only a 3-and-a-half win player afterwards.
Ralph Kiner declined slightly, too….6.1 to 5.3. That isn’t precipitous. Duke Snider improved by the same approximate amount.
Manny Ramirez was the only slugger to improve significantly, jumping from a three-win player to a five-win player.
The rest of the lot essentially stayed the same….some declined a bit and some improved a bit, but over the thirteen years, their value held up.
That isn’t to say that they were the same players every year….it is likely that the group aged within the expected curve, having their best years in their twenties and declining in their thirties. But over the expected duration of Stanton’s contract, most of the players comparable to Stanton held their value.
How about Weighted Runs Created Plus? This is a metric similar to OPS+, one that considers a player’s offensive value after adjusting for park and league contexts.
Player
|
wRC+
|
wRC+
|
Name
|
Rookie to Age 24
|
Ages 25-37
|
Rocky Colavito
|
149
|
128
|
Reggie Jackson
|
144
|
145
|
Ralph Kiner
|
144
|
147
|
Manny Ramirez
|
134
|
158
|
Jose Canseco
|
132
|
130
|
Jack Clark
|
131
|
141
|
Frank Robinson
|
143
|
159
|
Duke Snider
|
121
|
145
|
Darryl Strawberry
|
139
|
136
|
Boog Powell
|
133
|
134
|
The only player to decline was Rocky Colavito. Every other player either stayed at the level they had been at (Reggie, Kiner, Canseco, Strawberry, Powell) or improved (Manny, Jack Clark, Frank Robinson, Duke Snider).
Giancarlo Stanton has a career wRC+ of 143. It is a good bet that he will post a wRC+ around there for the next thirteen years. Again, that’s the composite expectation: he will have years where his wRC+ is higher than 143, and years when it is lower than 143.
How about isolated power?
Player
|
ISO
|
ISO
|
Name
|
Rookie to Age 24
|
Ages 25-37
|
Rocky Colavito
|
.265
|
.212
|
Reggie Jackson
|
.245
|
.233
|
Ralph Kiner
|
.259
|
.272
|
Manny Ramirez
|
.255
|
.282
|
Jose Canseco
|
.233
|
.255
|
Jack Clark
|
.204
|
.211
|
Frank Robinson
|
.253
|
.242
|
Duke Snider
|
.207
|
.259
|
Darryl Strawberry
|
.248
|
.246
|
Boog Powell
|
.215
|
.186
|
Two players - Rocky Colavito and Boog Powell – saw their isolated power decline, though not dramatically. Manny and Snider saw big increased in their power numbers. The rest of the field stayed the same.
How about strikeout rate?
Player
|
K%
|
K%
|
Name
|
Rookie to Age 24
|
Ages 25-37
|
Rocky Colavito
|
14.4%
|
11.0%
|
Reggie Jackson
|
25.5%
|
21.6%
|
Ralph Kiner
|
15.3%
|
11.2%
|
Manny Ramirez
|
18.4%
|
18.5%
|
Jose Canseco
|
23.0%
|
24.3%
|
Jack Clark
|
13.1%
|
19.3%
|
Frank Robinson
|
13.5%
|
12.6%
|
Duke Snider
|
14.3%
|
15.3%
|
Darryl Strawberry
|
23.5%
|
20.3%
|
Boog Powell
|
18.1%
|
14.5%
|
Here’s a weird one: only Jack Clark saw his strikeout rate increase as he aged. Everyone else either struck out at the same level they used to, or made slightly more contact.
How about walk rate?
Player
|
BB%
|
BB%
|
Name
|
Rookie to Age 24
|
Ages 25-37
|
Rocky Colavito
|
13.5%
|
12.4%
|
Reggie Jackson
|
12.8%
|
11.6%
|
Ralph Kiner
|
13.8%
|
16.7%
|
Manny Ramirez
|
12.7%
|
13.8%
|
Jose Canseco
|
9.0%
|
12.0%
|
Jack Clark
|
10.3%
|
17.4%
|
Frank Robinson
|
10.2%
|
12.5%
|
Duke Snider
|
8.6%
|
13.0%
|
Darryl Strawberry
|
12.7%
|
13.0%
|
Boog Powell
|
11.4%
|
13.5%
|
If Jack Clark’s strikeout rate increased, the parallel effect was that his walk rate also jumped up, from 10% to 17%. Duke Snider also saw an increase. No one really lost the capacity to draw free passes.
I’ll note, again, that I didn’t choose these players deliberately: I was looking at a row of metrics, and trying to find which players had numbers that looked the most like Stanton’s.
I am surprised, then, at how versatile the list turned out to be. Only one player, Rocky Colavito, experienced a significant decline. And, really, we’re using the word ‘significant’ pretty aggressively: from the age of twenty-five to thirty-three, Colavito’s average batting line was 34 homers, 103 RBI’s, 90 runs scored, and an OPS of .851. This was the sixties: his OPS+ was 131 over those years. He made six All-Star teams and finished 4th, 5th, and 8th in MVP votes. This is our worst player, in terms of diminished skill.
This isn’t to say that all of these players had brilliant careers in the thirteen years after they turned 25. Darryl Strawberry had five excellent seasons and then he washed out. Canseco’s greatness as a hitter was overshadowed by a few bone-headed events and some poor life choices. Ralph Kiner was out of baseball at an age when the Marlins would still owe five years of salary to Stanton.
But even with the washouts….all of them remained elite hitters. Darryl Strawberry had a 1.112 OPS the last year he was in the majors. Ralph Kiner his .243 in his last year, but it wasn’t an empty .243: he had a .452 slugging percentage, walking more than he struck out.
What this suggests is that Giancarlo Stanton will be the same hitter he has been: over the duration of this contract, we can expect that Giancarlo Stanton will continue to hit about as well as he has hit.
Which gets us to our next – and more speculative – question: how likely is it that Giancarlo stays healthy for the duration of his contract?
Here are the games played for each player, from 25 to 37:
Name
|
Games
|
Years
|
Avg. Gm/Year
|
Rocky Colavito
|
1458
|
10
|
146
|
Frank Robinson
|
1844
|
13
|
142
|
Manny Ramirez
|
1805
|
13
|
139
|
Reggie Jackson
|
1797
|
13
|
138
|
Duke Snider
|
1602
|
13
|
123
|
Boog Powell
|
1356
|
11
|
123
|
Ralph Kiner
|
1176
|
10
|
118
|
Jack Clark
|
1398
|
12
|
117
|
Jose Canseco
|
1319
|
12
|
110
|
Darryl Strawberry
|
1067
|
13
|
82
|
This is, again, encouraging. Excepting Darryl Strawberry, these players avoided significant injuries. Some players, like Kiner and Colavito, retired well before they reached thirty-seven, but both men were generally healthy before their retirement.
And…Giancarlo Stanton seems more like the guys on the top of the list than the guys on the bottom. Boog Powell isn’t really like Giancarlo Stanton, and unless Stanton has a drug problem that we (and, presumably, the Marlins) don’t know about, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect him to miss substantial time like Strawberry or Canseco.
Jack Clark was a fine hitter, and the rare player who said what was on his mind most of the time. But Jack Clark was a bridge-burner: he pissed off every franchise he played for, picking fights with guys who had better reputations that he did. He hasn’t exactly stopped doing that in retirement.
The guys at the top were the hard workers. Manny Ramirez, for how loopy he sometimes seemed, was a very hard worker. Frank Robinson worked hard. Reggie had an ego, but he worked his tail off. Duke Snider did, too. If you had to guess which group Stanton belongs in, you’d take the top-half. Maybe that’s not a particularly mathematical answer, but it’s the right one.
So we’ve reached two conclusions. Or, I have:
1. Giancarlo Stanton will be about the same hitter for the duration of this contract as he has been, and,
2. Giancarlo Stanton is a solid bet to stay healthy for most of the contract.
* * *
When I heard the news, my initial response was the same as everyone else: I was shocked that any team was offering a 13-year contract, and I was surprised that the team offering it was the Marlins.
But…the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that it’s a great contract. I fully suspect that Giancarlo Stanton, just in terms of what he will do on the field, will provide more value than the $325 million the Marlins have invested. If he plays the contract out, I think he’ll actually be a bargain at $25 million per year. If he opts out, it’ll turn out to be an absolute heist for the Marlins, who will have underpaid for his peak seasons.
There is, too, the reality that $25 million a year is going to be a very different number in thirteen years than it is today. Just to illustrate that, here are the top-five teams by payroll for 2001, and from 2014:
Team
|
2001 Payroll
|
Team
|
2013 Payroll
|
NYY
|
$113
|
LAD
|
$254
|
BOS
|
$110
|
NYY
|
$246
|
LAD
|
$109
|
BOS
|
$178
|
CLE
|
$93
|
DET
|
$154
|
NYM
|
$93
|
PHI
|
$151
|
$25 million in salary would have represented a quarter of a top team’s salary in 2001. This year, $25 million would’ve been 1/10th of the team payroll of the Dodgers or Yankees. The top team’s payroll has more than doubled over the last thirteen years….it is possible that when Stanton is at the tail end of his contract, the highest team payrolls in the league will be nearing $500 million. Within that context, the money Stanton will get at the end of the contract won’t seem prohibitive for many teams, or crippling.
There is a strong tendency, in our small corner of the baseball realm, to worry about what it will be like at the end of these mega contracts. What we seem to forget about is the immense bargain that these players are in their early years. Robinson Cano, the previous big-contract signer, might not be a great player in 2023, but he was great in 2014: he was the best second baseman in baseball last year, not from a lack of quality challengers. Maybe the Mariners will regret the contract seven years down the road, but Robinson Cano absolutely delivered in Year One: he helped the moribund Mariners contend in a tough division.
And….though I am reluctant to bring up Alex Rodriguez, it seems relevant to note that his original ten-year contract, the one that the Rangers offered him for his Age-25 to Age-34 seasons, was a tremendous value. If you prefer fancy metrics like WAR, A-Rod averaged a 7.1 bWAR over that decade. If you prefer more traditional numbers, Rodriguez averaged 42 homeruns and a .971 OPS. Even if you expand A-Rod’s initial contract to thirteen years, you have a player who averaged 6 wins above replacement for the duration.
Giancarlo Stanton isn’t going to match Alex Rodriguez. And Stanton probably won’t be a bargain when he’s a thirty-seven year old first baseman. But he is a bargain now, and all evidence suggests that he’ll be a bargain for most of the years of his contract. The Marlins were smart to lock him up.
David Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.