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Originally Posted by Heltonfan
It amazes me that people are stupid enough to think that extreme home-road splits make a player less valuable. Why should we care if the distribution of performance is different if the overall value is the same?
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There is another potential blunder that can come from this in the real world. If you pay your extreme-split hitter like he's "just as valuable" as a more legitimate talent that is less dependent upon the ballpark for assistance, you've vastly decrease your options there and the real asset value to your organization.
Other teams pay attention to splits for hitters in more extreme parks. The trade demand for a hitter who puts up most of his numbers in Coors and struggles on the road just isn't going to be as high, and certainly will be even less if he's over-paid for his actual objective abilities. He doesn't get to take Coors Field with him if he's traded to another team.
Demand may not show up in a numeric value of a player's worth based upon performance alone, but it certainly contributes to their real world worth and as a GM it doesn't hurt having more flexibility with more players in greater demand when trying to build up your organization through all the different avenues.
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Tulo is a tremendously valuable young player. In fact, you could make a pretty good argument that prior to this deal he was the single most valuable commodity in all of baseball... This deal does nothing to change that.
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That's getting carried away IMO to rank him at the very top like that with such limited experience. I don't understand the rush to such elite greatness there for a player who hasn't really hit outside of Coors and is a fantastic defensive shortstop but not vastly different from some of the other elites with the glove who aren't raved about in the least bit. I hope it all doesn't go to his head, but it certainly could.
And the deal does change things. It adds risk where none was necessary before. It also sets precident for other agents of our up-and-coming youngsters to push for premature payment. Nobody in the history of the game has received this lucrative of a contract at this level of experience. It just seem rather unusual to me and unnecessary. It's not a bad thing but would have been near the bottom of priorities for me this off-season as Tulo wasn't going anywhere and we could have used more help otherwise.
But did they make a wise investment by springing the big dollars on him now for the long-term where it would have cost them significantly more if they waited? Maybe. Time will tell, but with a historic deal larger than anyone before for this level I can't imagine there is a huge savings there even if he performs very well, and certainly more risk for us if he doesn't compared to letting the process play out as it normally would.