Miami Marlins free agency: avoid bad contracts

The Miami Marlins need to be active at the top of the free agent market. There’s no excuse not to do it, and if we don’t then Bruce Sherman is failing as the owner. Sherman can afford to go as high as the luxury tax, if he doesn’t have that kind of payroll it’s 100% because he just doesn’t want to. Playing at the top of the free agent market is a must if we intend to compete annually as well. Giving out bad long-term contracts however has to be avoided.

Trea Turner will be a bad long-term contract for some team.

I get it, I really do. Trea Turner is a hometown boy and is batting .304/.348/.484 with 20 home runs and 97 RBI and 4.8 WAR for the Los Angeles Dodgers, why wouldn’t you want the Miami Marlins to sign him? He’s a stud top of the order bat and an upgrade for us at SS. Kim Ng should be trying hard to sign the guy. We almost certainly won’t actually sign him, but that’s because we’re not expected to sign top free agents.

I wrote about why Trea Turner is a bad contract earlier, and not much changed on that front. It’s important to remember that when a team signs a free agent, it pays him for what he’s going to do, not what he’s already done. What a player has already done shows his ability, but isn’t evidence of what we can expect from him going forward. He’ll be older and many players do better in their contract years then they do in other years.

The problem with Trea Turner is that he’s already 29 and will be 30 next year. He’ll almost certainly require a 7 year deal of $30 million or so a year, that puts him at a minimum of $200 million. He has a pretty significant injury history and isn’t really a power threat, though he’s capable of 20 home run seasons, he only topped 20 once before and has an unimpressive 89.1 Exit Velocity.

Trea Turner is a good player and is from Florida. It’s natural to want him on the Miami Marlins. The problem is his injury history, lack of power (that we badly need) and contract length and cost. We almost certainly won’t sign him and that’s a good thing.