A lot of these examples are second tier free agents, but, here is a summary of Boras clients who waited to sign, with the trend being the majority of those players got a lesser deal than was anticipated at the start of free agency:
https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2024/01/boras-clients-who-signed-after-january-in-previous-offseasons.html
Totally fair - and I'm making no predictions about his second (or third tier) FAs like JDM or Ryu or whatever. Boras also may very well have cost his clients some money by dragging it out (notice how I don't think he's going to get projections for Bellinger or Snell
https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2023/11/2023-24-top-50-free-agents-with-predictions.html). I'm just saying that I think the narrative that the market has crashed (is crashing) on these guys is overblown - or at least as far as semantics will allow, which is why I put numbers to it.
Someone might say "Snell was projected to get $200m so $175m would be a crash", and I get why they'd say that. I don't think of it that way however, which again, is why I estimated some numbers. I'm still thinking Snell and Bellinger around $175m, Monty around $150m, Chapman around $125m with the caveat of if they end up in no income tax states (realistically Texas and Washington) it might be a bit lower because I admit I'm basing those numbers based off your traditional big markets like those Cal teams, NY teams, Boston, Philly. So somewhere like California you'd be looking at roughly needing 13% more because of their tax rate, as opposed to Texas with none.
@Cassvt2023 - Just for the record, I think it'd be awesome if Boras got it massively wrong. I think that the dragged out off-season hurts the game. It'd be better to have that massive week of activity at the winter meetings and have it be an event the way the start of NBA or NFL free agency is. His methods usually do very well for his clients, which as a fiduciary is his only responsibility - of course it gets murky when what is best for guys like Snell might hurt someone like Ryu, but that's a conversation of BIZ-NIZ ETH-ICKS (in my best Billy Madison voice) and another topic altogether. I just don't think he misread the market so badly as to have to settle for less than that for his top 4 clients, though Chapman is the one I'm least confident on sticking to $125m.
Flawless free agent? Probably the closest thing was Arod in 2001. 25 year old shortstop coming off a 10 WAR season, true 5-tool player at the time.
Good call. Absolutely correct. But to go back a generation kind of illustrates the point of how if you're looking for a flawless free agent to spend on at the top of the market, they're very rare (even if we allow that ARod, Manny, Beltre and lets say Harper and Cole were "flawless").
I don't think he's that far off (though only saying 9 players worth keeping as an ostensible big market team is a bit unfair).
Connecting all the dots, I'm becoming more and more convinced that Breslow has seen / believes what at least I'll say I believe. Which is that the organization he took over at the MLB and upper minors levels is pretty darn terrible and a lot closer to the Royals than it is the Braves, and we're at the beginning of a pretty massive rebuild.
Gammons had a Tweet about it recently, something to the effect of "a team that isn't as good as they (FSG) think", which came out right after the Theo news broke. I think people looking at it from the outside (which thankfully Breslow was and Theo was at the time) think there is a LOT of work to be done to get back to being a true contending team (and not just one that will be +/- 5 games of WC3 in August).
Those are two pretty well known names in Boston sports (Gammons and James) that have ties to Theo and that tree now saying the same thing.
Which doesn't mean "hopeless", I'm not saying that. But if this were like the NFL and players could be cut at any time without constricting salary ramifications, what are the players you'd keep on the MLB team that Breslow inherited. For me it looks like this:
C - Wong; 1b - Casas; 3b - Devers; CF - Rafaela; LF - Duran.
SP - Bello, Crawford, Pivetta
Bullpen - Jansen, Houck, Whitlock, maybe Winckowski.
So call it a dozen.
He of course added Grissom (13) and signed Giolito (14) and did add O'Neill (15) though I don't really count the last two because there is virtually no chance they'll be on the team in 2025.
FWIW, I don't think that Story, Yoshida or Abreu are "bad" players, I just think that for the first two I'd rather have the money and roster spaces back and the last I'd rather have a better OF construction, so it's not so much his being bad as opposed to a bad fit for the roster (and someone I have significantly below Duran and Rafaela). I'd also have traded Jansen, but maybe they couldn't because he wouldn't have passed a physical.