I continue to believe that a Freeman signing is quite unlikely, but some of the concerns expressed here surprise me.
Not the exact same circumstances, but this has whiffs of the Adrian Gonzalez experience, which I am not eager to repeat.
If the Adrian Gonzalez experience Is the floor here, sign me up to roll the dice on the median outcome or better. Gonzalez didn’t hit like a superstar here but he was quite good. He hit slightly better in his first year in Boston than he did in his final stud year in SD (155 OPS+ vs 152). And though he tailed off quite a bit in his second year, he was hardly a bust: .300/.343/.469, 117 OPS+
Gonzalez went on to play above average ball for three years after the trade, with OPS+ of 125, 130, and 131. Then came a passable 111, then putrid 70 and 88. So he fell off a cliff in his age 35 season, which is a red flag. But he’s just one comp.
Sox traded for AG when he was 28, Freeman turns 33 in September.
This to me is another way of saying that Freeman will be 32 for all but a few weeks of the upcoming season. 32 is scary enough to be handing out long term contracts, let’s not prematurely age the man!
I think it’s reasonable to expect three great to above-average years out of Freeman. The runway could be even longer or it could be shorter. If he can be had for 6 years, that’s half the life of the contract as a key contributor, then maybe you get a season and a half of average production and maybe a season and a half of suckitude? By then the tax level will have risen quite a bit and the contract isn’t any kind of albatross. Plus, that’s just sort of the cost of doing business in free agency. I still very much prefer seeing what we have in Casas and Dalbec. If they don’t work out, we can simply sign some other free-agent masher down the line. That gamble seems worth it to me because it holds the potential for the Sox to allocate resources now to more pronounced areas of need. But Freddie Freeman is a stud and I can definitely see the reasons why the Sox would be interested.