More Reflections on a Potential Vlad Deal.

In light of Shapiro's interview and because why not, I'ma do it again. IF they do make a deal that includes this season, 2025, Vlad's wanting 15 years (through his age 40 season) can work in their favor. If you start with $500 million in total value, which is a figure Vlad called his floor, and you make the last 4 seasons 20-20-15-15 (this is an off the cuff example) and round up the '25 salary to 30, that's $100m and leaves $400m over 10 in the middle.

The extended length makes the overall AAV 33.33 which is good for the Jays, in the peak years he'd get (and be worth, for all but one of them) $40m or more annually which should appeal to him, and his agent has to know that no other team is going to give him 15 years.

To illustrate in more detail, I'm going to steal the chart from Ben Nicholson-Smith's article that I've referenced before:

Here is a theoretical illustration of how such a deal might be structured:

30-36-42-45-45-45-45-40-40-36-30-22-20-12-12

What I'm doing here is minimizing the number of years that, if he produced more or less just what these projections suggest, that they would be noticeably underwater in terms of overpaying for that year's production. First, take note that BNS doesn't include 2025 on his chart but assuming he'll be worth $50m in '25 (using this formula) seems reasonable.

So to revise his chart and make it easier to follow...

Year	contract year	age	cost of 1 WAR	projected WAR	Value	proposed salary
2025	1	26	10	5	50	30
2026	2	27	10.3	5	51.5	36
2027	3	28	10.61	5	53.05	42
2028	4	29	10.93	4.5	49.17	45
2029	5	30	11.26	4.5	50.65	45
2030	6	31	11.59	4.5	52.17	45
2031	7	32	11.94	4	47.76	45
2032	8	33	12.3	3.5	43.05	40
2033	9	34	12.67	3	38	40
2034	10	35	13.05	2.5	32.62	36
2035	11	36	13.44	2	26.88	30
2036	12	37	13.84	2	27.68	22
2037	13	38	14.26	1.5	21.39	20
2038	14	39	14.69	1	14.69	12
2039	15	40	15.13	0.5	7.56	12

So that's surplus value for the first 8 years, and never more than $4 million underwater until the last year. In fact, if he underperformed this and only produced 4 WAR on average in years 2-6 he'd still not be underwater in the first 8 years. Of course it's not impossible to have a Prince Fielder situation but there's not really any way to pre-plan for that, it's the risk you take. Since I didn't include a totals line - that's 48.5 WAR, valued at $566.16 million, purchased for the low low price of $500 million.

Now, there's one more layer to this. Team payrolls 15 years ago were, in the top 12 spenders, at least $100m less than they are now (actual payroll, not CBT figures which wasn't a thing 15 years ago). The low spending teams don't inflate that much the mid-to large spenders do. If you project that forward then by the end of a 15 year deal the Jays payroll might easily be in the area of $350 million. In that context a $12m player is 3.4% of the payroll. For comparison, 3.4% of the 2025 payroll is almost $8.3m - Roughly what Dalton Varsho's making.

The point of all that is that if you structure the deal as I'm suggesting, Vlad's salary when he's nearing the end wouldn't be any sort of impediment to building a winning team. The whole gamble here is whether, in the main, he produces a career similar to what these generic projections would suggest. Think of it like this: if he is completely washed by 36 and gives you no value at all in the last four years, these projections still value him at roughly $495 million up to that point.

IF you - as the Blue Jays - have a value estimation system that produces generally similar projections to the publicly available Fangraphs system then it's not a massive risk to go to $500 million for that period of time unless you think he's gonna start crumbling before his mid-30s.