kab21 wrote:Skin Blues wrote:kab21 wrote:
Felix and Verlander were not available in FA and Greinke isn't as good as Lee. If it were as simple as just throwing a pile of money into FA then it wouldn't make sense to trade a top prospect for Lee but it isn't. Next year's FA class has Garza, Burnett and JJohnson in it. None of these guys are close to Cliff Lee's tier of pitchers. If you want an ace then you will probably have to trade a top prospect or two. It shouldn't need to be Bogaerts but it should be a really good prospect but it looks like they will go after Peavy now.
They signed away their FA seasons, it wasn't arb years or anything that drove the price down. Point is that there's no value there. These guys don't come up as FA very often, but Lee was a FA a couple years ago. Nobody, including the Red Sox, offered a 31 year old Cliff Lee more than $22.5M/yr so what makes you think they'd add in a top prospect and take on the heavily back-loaded portion for the now 34 year old? If the Phillies can get a big prospect for him, they should do it in a heartbeat. They might get a fringe prospect but my original point was to laugh at Amaro's suggestion that he would take no less than 3 of a team's top prospects.
They still weren't available for everyone to sign. And there is definitely not anyone close to Lee to sign next offseason. It was backloaded but this isn't the Buehrle contract that we are talking about. 25M/yr for an elite pitcher is not ridiculous.
He's 35 at the end of august. He's still human, 25 million a year is way too much. If the phillies can get someone to take his entire contract they should take the deal. And it's 25m/yr for the next two years. Then 27.5 million for a pitcher in his age 37 season.