And I expect that will increase. He’ll scrape by.
Saw this put into perspective today. Ohtani will be making (roughly):
$432,098.77 per game.
$116,666.67 per plate appearance.
$48,010.97 per inning.
$2,400.55 per minute.
Plus meal money.
SF signed the Korean CF Lee. 7/$113. He looks very good in the few clips I’ve seen.
I don’t know that much of him but “grandson of the wind” is a freaking awesome nickname.
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Reaction from stat twitter was that he’s a good player but his power numbers are going to fall off significantly in the Giants’ home park. But he seems like a disciplined hitter with good bat control, a classic #2 hitter in the old school mold, and if the CF defense holds up that’s a profile that adds to any lineup.
I saw a piece somewhere questioning whether he could really play CF, and opining that he might go to RF if that’s the case. If so, that’s a lot of money for a singles-hitting RF. I’ve never seen him play, so I’ve got no idea.
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I was going through baseball-reference.com this morning and stopped to look at Josh Fields’s entry. I didn’t realize that a) he was a first-round draft pick (Seattle, 2008) (save that one away for the next “Astros and first-round pick” in Immaculate Grid), and b) he came to the Astros as a Rule 5 pick (from Boston) in 2012. So Luhnow turned a Rule 5 pick into Yordan Alvarez. That alone ought to get him into the GM HoF.
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Here’s what BA has to say:
Nicknamed “Grandson of the Wind” in homage to his father, Lee is more of an above-average runner than a true burner. He has solid instincts and runs good routes in center field, but his range is a tick short, particularly on balls hit over his head. Lee has reliable hands and projects to be an average defender in center field, though he may have trouble in more expansive outfields. He has fringy arm strength that will force him to left field if he has to move.
Seems like an odd fit for San Francisco, but they needed outfield help and must have preferred him to Bellinger. And he may be the kind of guy who can smack enough gappers to keep pitchers honest, even if he’s not routinely going over the fence. I always like seeing guys from the pro foreign leagues succeed, so I’m pulling for him.
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It’s not “feets don’t fail me now”
…but it’s good
So now that much of the hysteria over the Ohtani contract has passed, can I get a breakdown on when exactly the Dodgers are going to be paying him the $680mm they defer for the first ten years?
ETA: Never mind. I quit being a lazy bitch and looked it up. So they will pay him $68mm a year for ten years starting in 2034.
Even, interest-free payments over the second ten years is my understanding (i.e., $68M/yr in 2034-2043).
Mine too. Here is the part from the Forbes piece I don’t get:
“At today’s inflation rate of 3.1%, Ohtani’s $68 million payout will be equivalent to roughly $125 million in 2043, the last year of the deferral deal.”
Wouldn’t the $68mm in 2043 be worth less because of inflation?
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Yeah, sounds like they botched the wording there. What they mean is that it would take roughly $125 million in 2043 to equal $68 million in 2023. They’re “equivalent”, but the other way around.
But all this hoopla and amateur accounting going on around this is hysterical. I don’t know how many online posts I’ve read about what a dumbass he is for taking a deferral because $680 million is worth more today than in 10 years. So many problems with that line of thinking, including:
- He’s only getting the $700 because he’s deferring it.
- He doesn’t get the whole contract amount today, regardless of the total amount, so he wouldn’t start with a $700 million principal.
- The whole tax avoidance issue.
Do an interest calculation on $48 million per year (what he was rumored to be offered without the deferral) for 10 years at 5% interest and 3% inflation. It comes to around $620 million, give or take a few million, depending on the particulars of the interest compounding. That’s him investing every nickel of it. There is this prevailing opinion by the armchair financial advisors that his agent, accountants, and financial analysts just fell off the turnip truck yesterday and are blissfully unaware of the concept of compound interest and the time-value of money. It’s quite funny.
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OK yes, I’d just come around to that understanding of the cloudy Forbes line too.
A friend of mine pointed out that the majority owners of the Dodgers are also the majority owners of a or of some futbol clubs that are getting awfully creative with their contracts, too. Inking prospects to incredibly long-term deals that exploit competitive loopholes or some such…
But are they for sure as smart as they think they are? It still seems to plain, unfinancially creative me, that paying $68mm a year to a guy who doesn’t work for you anymore, for a fucking decade, could end up sucking.
Of course it’s gonna suck. They’ll have the memories of the 20 years before to sooth their pain, I guess.
My impression is that Forbes has largely gone to shit.
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I’m waiting to hear what Buster Olney has to say before I form an opinion
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Me, when asked about Israel-Hamas
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The club in question is Chelsea. Basically, Chelsea has spent obscene amounts of money on transfers of players since they took over. The Premier League and Champions League have what they call “funancial fair play” where if you lose too much money over a 3 year period you will be penalized(point deduction in EPL and not being allowed to enter for the Champions League one).
The way that Chelsea is getting around this is, they would fail and fail majorly with how much they have spent, is a quirk in the way transfer payments work. When you buy a player, you send the full amount up front BUT it goes on your books as the amount paid divided by the years of the initial contract signed. So if you spend 70M on a new striker, you give the old club 70M right away but if you sign a 7 year contract(unheard of in soccer terms), your books count that a 10M spent for this season. Conversely, when you sell a player, that full amount goes on the books right away.
So in essence, you can spend 800M in one summer and as long as you sell 80-100M worth then you didn’t lose money on paper. Chelsea spent more in the first 2 transfer windows than the rest of the Premier League combined under the new ownership.
Hasn’t helped them in the league though, which warms my Fulham heart.