Yadier Molina just got paid (and that’s OK)

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Yadier Molina is 34 years old, which is not young for a baseball player, and has over 13,000 innings behind the plate just in his big-league career. Molina has a whole lot of miles on him, but the Cardinals negotiated an extension with him, anyway. It seems like the right kind of extension for the kind of player Molina is, though: three years isn’t an especially long time, even for a catcher of Molina’s age. While the average annual value of this contract — which sits between $55 and $65 million — is the highest for any catcher in the league, the length of the deal will help St. Louis more easily absorb that blow, should it eventually be a problem.

The Cardinals are definitely paying Molina for past production, but that’s probably OK, too. And what he’s still capable of is worth plenty, too: Molina posted a 110 OPS+ last year, which, means he was 10 percent better than league average offensively — when you adjust for his position, that OPS+ skyrockets to 124. He finished the year strong, he looked good in the World Baseball Classic, he was known for his defense and arm well before his bat — this might not all be true three years from now, but if it’s true in 2017 and 2018, then what happens in 2019 barely matters, anyway. No team pays for a multi-year deal thinking they’ll get full value for each and every year of it, not with the way free agency works.

So, the Cardinals keep their leader — who is still productive — around for three more years, and do so without completely breaking the bank. Molina’s deal might keep them from bringing in a big money free agent over the next couple of years, but this is the Cardinals: how often do they go out to spend huge dollars on free agency, anyway? They always look, rarely buy, and tend to end up with more midrange options like Mike Leake and Dexter Fowler on the rare occasion they even go to those lengths. As Grant Brisbee wrote back when they signed Fowler, they tend to just invent that player with their farm system, anyway. Unless Molina craters unexpectedly — and soon — we might not see any regret for this deal.

The next time the two sides negotiate? Well, that might be a different story. But the new contract hasn’t even begun yet, so we can give that some time.