Miami Marlins GM simulation: Giancarlo Stanton interest, a primer

The Miami Marlins figure to move Giancarlo Stanton this offseason. No surprise, as he stirred a lot of interest as soon as the FanSided simulation got started.

In case you’re unaware of what we’re doing at FanSided, take a read and catch up. It’s a lot of fun and you’ll want to follow from start to finish. But in short, this offseason, all of the site experts acted as the general managers of their team.

Acting as the Miami Marlins GM, I wanted to stay as close to reality as possible. My goal was to cut payroll within the $90-$100 million range. The most obvious place to start, is Giancarlo Stanton.

He garnered a lot of interest from the usual suspects. Trades involving Stanton were complex, heated, and full of posturing.

Naturally, I was determined to get back as much as possible. But that meant finding away around Stanton’s huge salary figure, which bidding teams used to their full advantage. The consensus approach was “we’ll do you the favor of taking him off your hands.”

Certainly at first, teams took the position that they were totally unwilling to take the entirety of Stanton’s contract. That was a problem for me, because even retaining some of his salary meant somewhere between $2-$4 million staying on the books every season.

When you’re strapped for cash, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Before we get into the particular bidders that were vying to get Stanton to switch his clothes, let’s take a look at some of the guidelines. I came up with a few tenets, which I didn’t disclose during the bidding process of course, that I needed to pull the trigger on a deal.