The impossible extension for Bryce Harper and the Nationals

The Washington Nationals are heading for a tussle with Bryce Harper. To save millions over the next four years, the Nationals are willing to hunker down and irritate Harper and his agent. In a normal situation, a team shouldn’t mess with the feelings of the ostensible cornerstone of the franchise. In a normal situation, this would seem like a risk. With a normal player and a normal agent, it would be useful to call the Nationals out for being pennywise and pound foolish, saving money in the short term at the risk of alienating someone important.

This isn’t one of those situations. The issue, from Ken Rosenthal:

The Nationals’ position is that they never agreed to the opt-out provision, which at the time was considered almost standard for such deals (major-league contracts for draft picks no longer are permitted under baseball’s collective-bargaining agreement).

Here’s the current structure of Harper’s deal:

Age 22: $2.25 million
Age 23: Arbitration
Age 24: Arbitration
Age 25: Arbitration

After that, Harper would become a free agent. The issue is with his salary for next season. If he goes to arbitration, he makes more next season, and then he makes more for the three seasons after that because arbitration-tethered salaries get progressively larger. It could be a $10 million difference or more. In a normal situation, you would be right to wonder if it’s worth it for the team.

This is not a normal player, agent, or situation. Here are the Nationals’ choices:

Oh, there’s a key part missing from this calculus. Harper’s agent:

Ah, yes. We’re discussing Bor-Äs, Mesopotamian god of contracts and subterfuge. It was Bor-Äs who convinced the French that there was no point in holding on to that boring land around Louisiana. It was Bor-Äs who got the brown M&Ms picked out of Van Halen’s pre-concert spread. Bor-Äs has been and always will be, and right now, he’s representing Bryce Harper.

One thing you’ll rarely find from me: knee-jerk criticism of Scott Boras, who works for his players and is generally excellent at his job. If the players don’t get the money, it would just go to the owners, so I’m not going to blame him for a lack of parity, outrageous salaries, scurvy or whatever else he usually gets blamed for.

Boras has a reputation for a reason, though. And if you’re the Nationals, you have a reason not to let tens of millions go. They wouldn’t be buying goodwill with it. They wouldn’t be buying anything with it. It would be a donation to Boras Corp. There is nothing the Nationals could do right now -- agree to the provision retroactively, erect a statue of Harper outside of Nationals Park, stand under his window strumming a simple, lovely tune -- that would make Harper sign a long-term, team-friendly deal with them.

Harper is the player that Boras has been dreaming of since Alex Rodriguez in 2000, a player who hits free agency at the same age some prospects are breaking into the league. A team that signs Harper to a 10-year deal in free agency will get him through his age-35 season. Except, a 10-year deal would probably be the starting point for Harper, and that’s if he merely sustains his current production. If he becomes the mega-star he’s supposed to be, he’ll get 12 years with an opt-out at the worst possible time for his team. No, 14 years. Really, if A-Rod got what he did 15 years go, there’s no telling what Harper could get on the open market in today’s baseball economy.

Here’s something that’s not going to stop that: The Nationals saying, alright, our bad, let’s tear up the existing contract. That won’t make a lick of difference. A team might trick itself into thinking it might make a difference with a normal player and a normal agent.

No, Harper is going to get a deal that will allow him to build a house on the moon and a bridge that allows him to drive his rocket car to his house on the moon. What the Nationals do with this current contract isn’t going to change that. Let’s take two incredibly young superstars and examine their contracts, to see if either one is a fit for Harper and the Nationals in the near future.

Trout would have been a free agent after the 2017 season. He would have been eligible for arbitration this offseason, and he would have set a record. Ryan Howard holds the current first-time record at $10 million, and that was six years ago. I’ll pull a number from my nether regions and suggest that Trout would receive a $14 million award. That would have ramped by a few million every year, so before the 2015 season, Trout would have been under something like a three-year, $60 million contract. That might be off, but what’s $10 million between friends?

It was a non-guaranteed contract, though, so there was risk. In the case of calamity, there wouldn’t be a nine-figure safety net at the other end. So Trout agreed to a six year, $144.5 million deal that starts in 2015. If you factor in what he would have won in contentious arbitration battles, it was closer to a three year, $85 million extension. Considering what teams would have paid in the distant future to get Trout’s 26-, 27-, and 28-year-old seasons in the present, that was something of a bargain.

If you shout the word “bargain” at Boras, he flinches like you’re shouting “Ni!” at him. Probably because he’s wondering how that dork got through security to shout “Ni!” at him. Still, Boras doesn’t do bargains. Giancarlo Stanton received more than twice the guaranteed money that Trout did. Don’t think that Boras didn’t notice.

Stanton was paid roughly what he would have received as a free agent. Maybe another team would have come over the top, but it was close to market value. He received 13 years and $325 million. The Marlins, being a weird, unstable franchise for most of their history, had to pay the Weird Unstable Tax.

Harper would sign that deal, I’d wager. He’d sign it quickly, and Boras wouldn’t worry about the missing free agency payday, considering his client still received something close to a record-setting deal.

Except, why on Earth would the Nationals even come close to that? Projection? Harper’s been a very good player, and the combination of his youth and baseball history suggests that he’s going to be an otherworldly great player soon. But the Nationals still have four years to figure out who is and isn’t record-setting-contract worthy. There’s still time to discover that Harper’s knees are warm Almond Joys, and that they can’t support the muscular frame of a player who plays with reckless abandon. There’s still time to discover that this is as good as Harper gets, that players don’t have to keep ascending into Hall of Fame territory just because they’re young.

The Nationals have no interest in giving Harper something like The Stanton. Harper and Boras have no desire to take The Trout. It’s a stalemate for now. We’ll see what kind of year Harper has and revisit in the offseason.

In the meantime, what the Nationals do with the contract isn’t going to make a lick of difference what happens over the next four years. Harper will get paid. Boras will see to it. Personal slights will not be considered.

What might happen is that Harper and the Nationals agree to a four-year contract that guarantees the money, which will come in somewhere between what the Nationals are planning to pay him and what he would have made as a Super Two player. That’s possible, if not likely. A long-term deal, though? Forget it. There’s too much of a difference between what Harper is right now and what he could be. And whatever happens, it won’t have much to do with how the Nationals treated him in the winter of 2014 and 2015.