The contract the Phillies gave Scott Kingery will become the new normal

I promise, in less than a week, things will be back to normal around here. A player will get hit in the beans, Mike Trout will rob a home run, an umpire will accidentally get slathered with pine tar, and the baseball season will be rolling. There will be other things to write about, baseball things, and it will be great.

For now, though, the offseason of austerity keeps coming, and now it has a new face. Let’s all get acquainted with Todd Kingery, even though he’s definitely someone we’ve all been thinking about for several years.

Wait, no, Scott Kingery. With two Ts. He’s a Phillies prospect who hasn’t had a plate appearance in the majors but now has a six-year deal with three options that guarantees him $24 million. If you’re a prospect nerd, you’re familiar with him (he was No. 31 on Baseball America’s top-100 list). If you’re like 99 percent of all baseball fans, you hadn’t heard of him before this weekend. Now he’s a multi-millionaire. What a country.

This doesn’t have to be a trend. But this is probably a trend.

It wasn’t a trend when the Tampa Bay Rays signed Evan Longoria to an absurdly owner-friendly deal just a few days after he made his major league debut. It was such a novel contract that there needed to be a wait-and-see period before teams and players replicated it. After waiting and seeing, players realized that kind of deal could cost them more than $100 million. Demand for premature contract extensions like Longoria’s was low, if only because he was so good at baseballing.

Interest from the players’ side picked up just a little when Matt Moore accepted a similar contract from the Rays and blew out his arm. Yes, he was underpaid while he was an all-star for them — likely giving them several millions of surplus value — but he wasn’t the same after his surgery, and he’s definitely being paid more than he would have been if he were a free agent this offseason. Both sides would at least consider that contract again, which makes it something of a rarity.

Interest from the players’ side really picked up when the Astros signed Jonathan Singleton to a five-year, $10 million extension before appearing in the majors, except that interest was almost entirely negative. Players hated the deal.

Turns out that it might have been the former. What that contract gave us, though, was a full spectrum. It’s the Singleton-Longoria spectrum, with Matt Moore plopped right in the middle. There’s an obvious risk for the player. There’s an obvious risk for the team. There are historical anecdotes to support both scenarios, and there’s even one where everything kinda sorta worked out for everyone.

This kind of contract will become a trend, then, and not only because of how previous variations worked out. It’s going to happen more often because young players aren’t seeing the pot of gold at the end of the team-control rainbow anymore. They’re seeing Mike Moustakas — an all-star who just set his franchise’s single-season home run record — limp into March without a job because of draft-pick compensation and a crumbling market. They also know there’s the chance that one shattered ankle, one collision with a wall, could make all of their future earnings disappear.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic, either. In Moore’s case, it was one commonplace surgery affecting everything that followed.

This will be a trend. And between the time I opened the story editor and me typing this sentence, Ketel Marte signed a five-year extension with options that’s similar to Kingery’s. Players are willing to give up an outside chance at Hollywood money for guaranteed regular-player money, and they’re going to keep doing this until the next CBA, at least.

If you’re in the mood for 5,000 words about why baseball’s future is in trouble, please read my article from last week, which comes to this conclusion:

Pay young players more money. If veterans aren’t going to get paid the way they used to, they’ll need something at the front end to make them feel better about it. It would make more sense, really, to pay players what they’re actually worth to a team. Paying a 24-year-old MVP the kind of money he’s earning for his team makes far more sense than tacking on a fifth year to the contract given to a 30-year-old MVP, just because that’s always how it’s been done.

With more contracts like the one the Phillies (and Diamondbacks) handed out, in theory, there should be more money for veterans. If the Phillies had eight Scott Kingerys in the lineup this year, giving them a chance at above-average production for just $4 million each, they might have signed Yu Darvish and Jake Arrieta. The teams with a lot of these contracts on the same roster will have more chances to spend. You would think this would make me, a person who is somehow very concerned with the struggle between millionaires and billionaires, happy.

Here’s what I think will happen, though: There will be players who go the Longoria/Bumgarner/Sale route and give their teams extraordinary value. There will be players who go the Singleton/Jose Tabata route and give their teams no value. Then there will be players who land somewhere in the middle. The best players will subsidize the worst players, the average players will give them just enough value to be happy, and the young players without the contracts will subsidize all of them and everyone else.

And the veterans who aren’t superstars still won’t get paid a whole bunch in free agency. Not with the teams sifting through different contracts on the Singleton-Longoria spectrum and still able to pay players close to the major league minimum for their first three years in the league.

Paying all young players more should be the goal of the MLBPA in the next collective bargaining agreement. It would lessen the (completely understandable) urge for players like Kingery to snatch up that guaranteed payday. Paying young players more would negatively affect veteran free agents who aren’t MVP or Cy Young candidates, but in theory, they’ll have already made their money. If the veteran free agents aren’t going to make money under the current system, like they didn’t this offseason, there’s only one way to fix that.

And if it’s not fixed, you’ll see contracts like Kingery’s more and more. He might have given up $100 million with this contract, or he might have earned $23 million more than he would have. The odds are in the owners’ favor, though, and we’ll probably see this kind of contract more and more over the next couple years.

The odds are always in the owners’ favor, you know.