Wednesday, December 8, 2010

What if the Cubs were in on Cliff Lee?

This is probably my stupidest post ever....so be it...

Look...first off, I want to say that no one has said anything about the Cubs being interested in Cliff Lee and there nothing is going on here...

But...

It has been reported since yesterday that two teams have made 7 year contract offers to Cliff Lee.

We know that the two leading teams to land Lee, the Yankees and the Rangers, have both said that they have no intention of giving Lee more than 6 years. The same can be said about a couple of the other interested teams, the Angels and the Nationals.

So if all that is indeed true...either there are more teams seriously interested in Cliff Lee or Cliff Lee's agent, Darek Braunecker is lying to someone about this in order to get one of these teams to up their offer.

So I began to wonder...

Do we know of a team that loves giving out long contracts to players who are in their 30s?

Do we know of a team that loves giving out no-trade clauses...something Cliff Lee is requiring in a contract?

Do we know of a team that is in desperate need of a superstar?

Do we know of a team that has a number of contracts coming off the books after this 2011 season and might have some money available in the long term for that contract?

Hmmmm....

Look, the Cubs have been playing this “our payroll is all maxed out” thing for basically 2 years now and they are sorely in need of a superstar player.

We just saw with the signing of Carlos Peña that the Cubs are going to defer $5 million of his contract until 2012. What if the Cubs did something similar with Cliff Lee.

Could they go ahead and give him 7 years at say $25 million per season and tell him that $12 million from 2011 will be given to him in 2018, the year after the contract expires?

At 32 years old...that puts Lee at 39 by the time his contract would run out...one year older than Soriano will be when his contract runs out in 2084 (it's something like that anyway)...

This isn't going to happen...everything that is being said by everyone tells us the Cubs aren't involved, but if these rumors about two 7 year contract officer are true, isn't it within the realm of possibility that the Cubs are one of these two teams?


(disclaimer: I'm not saying the Cubs should do this...they shouldn't. This wouldn't be as bad as the Soriano signing, but it would be pretty darn close.)