Revisiting a four-year deal for Uggla

Sports Illustrated’s Jon Heyman tweeted today that the Marlins have shifted to a four-year deal for second baseman Dan Uggla. The only money-related detail we got from the tweet was that the deal would start at $8M for 2011. We can obviously expect seasonal increases in salary from there.

Since the Marlins just supposedly offered a presumably more reasonable deal, I think this is  as good a time as any to revisit the contract crowdsourcing we did here at Marlin Maniac for Uggla’s next deal with the Fish. Let’s take a look at what 27 Marlins fans thought the Marlins were going to give Uggla.

Average years: 3.41 years
Average AAV: $10.41M

Median years: 3 years
Median AAV: $10M

Standard Dev years: 0.89 years
Standard Dev AAV: $2M

Does a deal like this make sense for the Marlins? If we take the average AAV along with the median of three years, we would get a contract of about 3 years/$31.2M. This is actually very close to my preferred realistic deal of 3-year/$33M. The readers here were split between three and four seasons, and since the Marlins are apparently offering four years, a deal at this given AAV would look like a 4-year/$41.6M offer that again runs pretty close to what we would expect.

The Fish are apparently offering just $8M for the 2011 season, so let’s see how a four-year offer for $41.6M could break down.

2011: $8M
2012: $11M
2013: $11M
2014: $12M

That breakdown adds up to $42M over the life of the deal. If the Marlins were planning on offering Uggla around the annual value voted here by the fans, this breakdown would be a pretty fair one. Uggla would receive essentially the same salary as in 2010 and get about a 50% pay raise from that 2011 salary for the remaining three years.

The question now is whether Uggla would accept such an offer, and I feel that he might hold off for a bit more. He is one season away from free agency, and if he and his camp honestly feel that they could be set to earn somewhere along the lines of $15M annually (the approximate value of his 2012 season if he were a decent defender), then they should and would hold off for more money. The truth, however, is that Uggla probably wouldn’t get a whole lot more than $11M annually in the market because, even if he feels he is still decent on defense, no one in the league believes him. If the Marlins offer something like 4-years/$44M, I doubt he would pass on the offer. From there, Marlins fans would have to hope that his defense doesn’t fall apart entirely by age 33.