Late on Friday night a report came out from C. Trent Rosecrans of The Athletic that the Cincinnati Reds had offered shortstop Elly De La Cruz a contract that could have made him the highest paid player in franchise history. As you now know, it was turned down by De La Cruz. There’s a lot of things going on here that deserve talking about.
In the first sentence of the story it says that De La Cruz’s offer from the Reds would have eclipsed that of Joey Votto’s 10-year, $225,000,000 extension. But the quote provided from Nick Krall, the team’s president of baseball operations was “we made Elly an offer that would’ve made him the highest-paid Red ever,” and I do think there’s things worth noting with the two things here.
A lot of the offers to players of the Elly De La Cruz variety in recent years that have signed big extensions have done so for a whole lot of guaranteed money, but also had incentives built into the contract that would bump things up anywhere from a little bit to a whole heck of a lot. Look no further than Hunter Greene, for example – his deal was for six years and $53,000,000, but that doesn’t include a $21,000,000 team option in the 7th year or that he could have earned over $20,000,000 more in various performance bonuses. There’s a pretty big difference between $53,000,000 and $95,000,000 but technically the Reds did offer Greene $95,000,000, give or take, in his contract. He won’t get that because he’s missed some of the bonuses already (he had bonuses for Cy Young placements and All-Star games). So the question is – was the offer for more money than Votto made all guaranteed money, or was it a contract built like Greene’s where a lot could be earned through things like MVP placement and All-Star games?
Let’s take it at face value, though, and say it was a guarantee for more money than what Joey Votto got out of his deal. That would mean that the deal would top $225,000,000. What would that kind of contract probably look like? I used some back of the napkin math to try and lay it out and here’s what I came up with:
YearSalaryDetails2025$2,000,000Year 2 in MLB2026$5,000,000Year 3 in MLB2027$10,000,000Arb 12028$17,000,000Arb 22029$22,000,000Arb 32030$30,000,000FA2031$30,000,000FA2032$30,000,000FA2033$30,000,000FA2034$30,000,000FA2035$30,000,000FATotal$236,000,000
The offer was made in the spring of 2025. That’s a pretty important note when trying to compare it to what Joey Votto got because Elly De La Cruz was just entering his second season in terms of his “pay scale” as it relates to service time. Votto signed his deal during his 5th full season, which was after he had already been paid for both his 1st and 2nd years of arbitration (the 5th year’s arbitration number was scrapped and replaced by the 1st year of his contract extension). De La Cruz was going to be making the league minimum of $760,000 in 2025 and in 2026 he would get the league minimum of $780,000 before finally reaching arbitration where he would get a significant raise but still one that was peanuts compared to what he could get in actual free agency. And the same holds true for both 2028 and 2029’s salary, too. Votto’s deal had to basically pay him free agent money far sooner in his 10-year deal, where with De La Cruz the escalation to free agent money would take a lot longer.
You can probably rearrange a little more money to the front end of the deal to take off a little at the back end of it if you’d like. Teams don’t usually do that for a lot of reasons, but hey, you can give that a shot. But it’s probably not going to change much overall here in that the deal would probably have to be 11 years or more and pay De La Cruz $30,000,000 a year for a bunch of those years in order to top the Votto deal.
What that would mean is that Elly De La Cruz wouldn’t reach actual free agency until he was 34-years-old. And that means that this would be the only time he could land a “big” contract (big is relative here, but since we’re comparing it to his peers and not us normal folks….). So then you get the question of, do you just take the gamble that you can get a free agent contract heading into your age 28 season that can be worth more than whatever $236,000,000 minus what you guess you would make going through the normal league minimum and arbitration systems before free agency?
Let’s math that one out a little bit. De La Cruz is going to make roughly $1,600,000 for 2025 and 2026 combined. But then he hits arbitration. Let’s just use the numbers above as a guide and say in 2027-2029 he will get $45,000,000 through the arbitration process. De La Cruz is then betting on himself being able to get a free agent deal in 2030 that would net him more than $189,000,000. For his part that seems like a good bet when you look around at how much money guys are getting paid (and let’s remember that when the offer was declined we did not have any of the recent signings of this offseason).
If we take the words of Nick Krall in the literal sense (the more money than Votto got was all guaranteed) and not the hypothetical sense (that if he earned all of his performance bonuses then he would have made more than Votto), then it doesn’t seem outrageous to say that they made a good offer. That offer just wasn’t quite good enough. Sometimes two things can be true at the same time. It’s possible that the Reds made a competitive and good offer and that Elly De La Cruz made a good choice in turning it down.
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