In short: MLB third baseman Mike Moustakas re-signs with the Kansas City Royals on a one year for $5.5 million dollars
If anyone were to read that line, it doesn’t seem like much of a big deal; grown-ass man getting paid millions of dollars to play a kids game, who cares, fuck that lucky motherfucker, etc, etc.
But it’s the background of the journey that ultimately makes the story as a whole more entertaining, because it’s reveals that it’s the story of a professional athlete who took a gamble on himself, but instead of triumphing in securing a long-term, way-more-multi-million dollar contract, he ends up falling on his face and has to sign for a fraction than he could have made had he not taken the gamble.
2017 was the walk year for Mike Moustakas, which is sports nerd-speak for a professional athlete in the final season of their contracted agreement with the team they play for, before they become a free agent, where they hope to sign a contract with the highest bidder, and secure hundreds of millions of dollars over the span of the next several years.
Professional athletes have developed this infuriating practice of suppressing their talent until they reach walk years, where they can unleash their full potential at the time in which potential suitors will be watching the most intently, thus creating an inflated sense of demand, and get maximum dollar, before they begin the whole cycle all over again, loafing early in their deals before ramping it back up as they approach free agency again. All will deny this, but it’s pretty undeniable if people take the time to look at professional statistics and see the blatant correlation with inflated production in the years prior to free agency.
Mike Moustakas was no stranger to this phenomenon, as he coincidentally set career highs in home runs and RBIs, two antiquated statistics that traditional baseball scouts and management tend to salivate over. At some point(s) after hitting home run(s) 23 through 38, as he was rounding the bases, he had to be thinking in his head “I’m SO going to get PAID next year!”
The Kansas City Royals, one of the many teams in Major League Baseball designated as a dreaded “mid-market” team, which is to say that they are not New York, Boston or Los Angeles levels of wealthy, knew they had no chance at meeting the likely financial demands of Mike Moustakas once the season ended. But due to the way Major League Baseball is structured, mid-market teams are somewhat protected from departing free agents with this concept where the former team, as long as they make what’s called the qualifying offer to an impending free agent, they will be compensated a bonus draft pick from the free agent’s new team, when they inevitably decline the offer and hit free agency.
The current rate for a qualifying offer these days has hovered in the $17 million dollar range for a single year’s service, and almost as a formality, the Royals offered Mike Moustakas the QO; naturally, Moustakas declined the QO, and went into the off-season with dollar signs in his eyes, and a certainty that some team would be in the market for a third baseman with home run power and be willing to sign him to a $110 million+ contract. Meanwhile, the Royals were pretty much resigned to the fact that they would have to settle for the bonus draft pick from whomever ended up signing him.
However, this was a particularly peculiar off-season in baseball, where the balance between traditional and new-age thinking seemed to take something of a meteoric shift; and almost like an overnight phenomenon, the general managers of baseball collectively seemed to all simultaneously have this revelation that blockbuster free agent-long term-mega million dollar deals were terrible investments.
At the time I’m writing this, there are numerous major name baseball players who still do not have a home for the 2018 season, despite the fact that Spring Training is already underway, and all 30 teams are chugging away at their 2018 plans regardless of who they were able to sign or not sign. It’s gotten so epidemic this year that a legitimate, third-party Spring Training camp had to open up, solely for all the unsigned free agents, so they can properly prepare and get themselves physically ready for a baseball season, regardless of their team status.
And up until recently, Mike Moustakas was likely one of those lost souls floating in Bradenton, getting his reps in and preparing for 2018, regardless of the fact that he really didn’t know where he was going to end up. Prior to 2017, free agents were almost always seen as these prize stallions, available to the highest bidder, with hopes that they’ll improve their clubs; but this past winter, free agents were literally turned into an animal rescue, where teams wait until all other channels have dried up before looking at the island of homeless baseball players to see how they can patch their holes and fill their gaps, at the lowest possible investment.
In summary, Mike Moustakas turned down a one-year, $17.4 million dollar qualifying offer from the Kansas City Royals, because he thought he was sure to get a multi-year, multi-more-million dollar contract from someone. And in the end, Mike Moustakas re-signs with the Kansas City Royals for one-year, $5.5 million dollars. Sure, he also gets an extra $1 mil from the Royals since they bought out an optional extra year on his previous deal, and there are several incentives in his new contract that could boost his bottom line more, but the fact of the matter is that he’s not going to even come close to sniffing $17.4 million dollars in 2018.
Mike Moustakas took a tremendous gamble on himself, and failed miserably.
I think I would have to say that among all types of sports journalism, it’s stories like these that tend to amuse me the most. Professional athletes are already richer beyond than a guy like me could hope to ever experience save for winning a massive lottery, so pleebs like us tend to take a massive amount of relish from seeing those more fortunate than us make stupid decisions and metaphorically fuck themselves over; sure, the end result for Mike Moustakas is still rated in the millions, but not as many millions as he was hoping to get.
This basically makes Mike Moustakas the Dwyane Wade of Major League Baseball, since Wade is my poster boy for failed gambles, when he opted out of like $42 million dollars from the Heat, thinking he was going to get a bigger deal from anyone. But he seemed to forget that he voluntarily turned the mantle of Batman over to LeBron James, and that nobody would want Robin, and when nobody signed him, he came back to the Heat for less money and no dignity.
That’s basically what Mike Moustakas is now – owned.
