The San Diego Padres have broken the record book by handing Manny Machado the most lucrative contract in North American sports history.
$300 million over 10 years. That’s a lot of coin — as in $30 million per season.
Machado, a two-time Gold Glove Award winner at third base with the Baltimore Orioles in 2013 and ’15, is joining a franchise that had the fourth-worst record in all of baseball in 2018 but boasts one of the best prospect pools in the major leagues. His addition will make San Diego a much better ball club, but they are a handful of years away from even thinking about challenging for a World Series title.
Averaged out over a 162-game season, Machado will earn $185,185 a game, or roughly $42,000 per plate appearance. I won’t stop you from rolling your eyes or muttering an obscenity, but Machado apparently left money on the table. There is a report the Chicago White Sox offered the 26-year-old free agent an 8-year, $250 million package that could have ballooned to $350 million once incentives and vesting options were added. That would have given the Hialeah, Florida native a staggering average annual value of $43,750,000.
Still, at $30 million a season, is he worth it? Machado is the same guy who drew the ire of baseball fans in Game 2 of the NLCS last year when he didn’t bother hustling to first base on an infield ground ball. So there’s that.
But we can’t ignore his performance at the plate. Over the last four seasons of his seven-year big league career, Machado’s average stat line is impressive — .284 batting average, 36 home runs, 96 RBI’s. And he’s durable, missing only 11 games in the last four years.
By comparison, over the same time period, fellow high-profile free agent outfielder Bryce Harper has hit .283, with 32 homers and 93 RBI’s, albeit playing in 67 fewer games.
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Harper’s ceiling, as evinced by his remarkable 2015 MVP season in which he banged out 42 home runs, is higher than Machado’s and even though the latter will be the face of the Padres, Harper is one of the faces of Major League Baseball.
So when Harper signs his contract, it should come to no one’s surprise that he will be the new mega-deal record holder.
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