Long Term Contracts

An important element of planning your freeze list is deciding which of your players, if any, should get a long-term contract.

The downside of doling out long-term contracts is obvious. Every dollar you add to a player's salary takes away from the value you have on your freeze list. You are also increasing your risk over the life of the contract that your player will get hurt, become ineffective and/or lose his job to that young kid who's been tearing it up in Tacoma.

The upside to a contract is two-fold. The more obvious upside is that you still get to keep a player for an additional year or two years at a bargain price. Carl Crawford is available as a free agent for the first time in my league, and the owner who had him at $20 the last three years isn't complaining. For his $60 investment between 2004-2006, this owner got $123 in earnings, or $63 in profits.

The less obvious upside is that a cheap player locked into a long-term contract gives you more leverage when teams at the bottom of the standings are looking to pack it in for the year. Option-year players give you a lot of value on your roster, but you can't do anything with them but accumulate stats. Give everyone on your roster an option-year only and you'll lose out when the dump trades begin.

Deciding when to give a contract and how long to give a contract for is one of the more nuanced decisions in Rotisserie Baseball. This is yet another area where there is little to no guidance from common areas on the Internet and popular Roto publications. Since this is something that most of us (including me) have to deal with, I'm only too glad to offer my two cents.

I don't like to give a contract that's less than $5 between the player's perceived value and his projected value. If I own Curtis Granderson at $10, and I think he's going to earn $18 this year, I'm not giving him a $15 L2 (two-year deal). Even if you believe that Granderson has enough upside to be a $20+ player, you're pricing yourself out of the kind of bargain you want to be getting from one of your better freezes. You're also making it harder to dump that player mid-year. Why should I trade for a player who's only $3 undervalued? I can't build my team around a guy like that.

My next suggestion is don't give a hitter more than a $25 salary with a contract or a pitcher more than $20. Granted, a $25 contract for a hitter or $20 for a pitcher is going to be the exception anyway. But try to avoid the temptation of giving Grady Sizemore a $28 L3 (three-year deal) because you think he's going to be a $35 player for years to come. Yes, he might be. But $35 is an extremely high bar that not many players reach. Twenty American League hitters earned $28 or more last year. The odds of Grady even matching those earnings every year over the life of that contract aren't spectacular.

Pitching is even more of a crapshoot. It's tempting to give a cheap reliever a four-year long term deal if you have him for $1 or $2. Don't. As we all know, a lot can happen in four years, and closers are the most fungible players in the game.

Third, try to avoid giving contracts to players past their prime. If you drafted someone cheap who re-emerged, it's great to have the bargain. But don't get excited and assume that he's going to keep putting up great earnings for you over the life of the deal. He might, but I've found that players who are getting snatched up cheap in their early 30s and have a breakout year are equally likely to fade out early. Major league teams also have a way of pushing these guys back into role positions pretty fast.

I mentioned dumping earlier in this post. Keeping dumping in mind is a great reality check when you're giving out contracts. If you gave out an $8 L2 to Craig Monroe last year only to find out no one wanted him in a dump deal, chances are that you should have simply optioned him out. Monroe might turn a solid profit at $8, but he turns even more of a profit at $3, and that extra $5 you could have spend in the auction might have meant the difference between Jim Thome and Jason Giambi in your auction.

When I'm on the fence about giving out a two-year deal, one thing that sometimes pushes me toward a three-year contract is the idea that I can sell the player not only as someone cheap for my trading partner next year, but also as someone he can trade in next year's dump deal when he's in contention. Getting a cheap L2 in a dump trade is nice, but you can't move him again...all you're acquiring is his value. Getting an L3 gives you a cheap player for your auction next year, but also gives you someone you can turn around and deal when you're in the running in 2008. And that's quite a perk.