Tommy (Gets The) Two Bags

The Cardinals buy out Tommy Edman's arbitration years.

Let’s be clear up front, much like we were when discussing the Matt Carpenter news in the last missive. What we are going to talk about today makes no difference whatsoever. The fact that the Cardinals bought out Tommy Edman’s arbitration years with a two-year extension is fine. It doesn’t move the needle much one way or another. It’s not an exorbitant cost. It’s meh, it’s fine, it’s OK.

I just don’t know if it was necessary or the wisest use of resources. There are arguments for and against this, so let’s take a little time to go through them. What else are you going to do, hold your breath until the club makes another move?

Let’s go through the positive parts of this deal first, shall we?

1. The Cardinals don’t have to go through an arbitration hearing. The fact that they were willing to over less than $500,000 on a player that they have valued highly through his career was strange but it makes sense if there was something like this in the works. Most fans know by now that the arbitration process hardly ever works out well for the player, even if they win. It’s always good when you don’t have to tell a guy you will be counting on these are the reasons you shouldn’t get paid.

2. The Cardinals and Edman both get security. The Cards don’t have to guess about what Edman’s salary is going to be in 2025. Tommy knows he’s got $16.5 million coming to him over the next two years rain or shine. It’s a good thing for both sides, especially the Cardinals who have always liked cost certainty but even more so in these RSN-uncertain times.

3. Edman preserves his free agent rights. It would be interesting to know if either side wanted to run this out longer than two years. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Whatever the case, Edman can look forward (with anticipation or trepidation) to the free agent market in two years.

That feels like the upside to this move. It’s not nothing, not by a long shot, and maybe there are other things that are beneficial that my readers (who usually know more than I do) can put in the comments. However, I think there are some drawbacks to this as well, at least from the team point of view.

1. They may spent more money than they had to. Even if Tommy Edman won the arbitration hearing, he would have made just under $7 million. Would the arbitration process award him $9.5 million next year? Possibly. You can never tell with arbitration and it would depend on how his season went. It also allows the Cardinals to continue to say that payroll has increased, even if it’s not exactly the way we’d like it to happen.

2. They are locked into Edman for two more years. On the face of it, that should be up in the positive section, right? Yet for his career Edman is a perfectly average player (100 OPS+, where 100 is average) and three of his five years in the league he’s been around 8-10% below average offensively. Defense obviously plays a role in his value, but we are seeing that average major leaguers usually generate around 2 WAR. Last year, Edman had 2.1 bWAR and 2.3 fWAR, numbers in line with the rest of his career save 2022, which may have been an outlier.

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As I said on Gateway to Baseball Heaven last night, there’s a universe out there where Tommy Edman is a non-tender candidate without this contract at the end of 2024. Assume, for a moment, that he puts up a typical Edman season, about a 93 OPS+ (or wRC+ if you want, as they are similar.) If Masyn Winn establishes himself at shortstop and Victor Scott II looks poised to take over center field in 2025, where does that leave Edman?

Backup shortstop, you might say, and there’s some truth to that. However, do you pay a backup shortstop $8-9 million? Especially when the middle infield is going to be crowded with Thomas Saggese pushing to join Nolan Gorman and Brendan Donovan. Granted, none of those guys are your typical shortstop, but Saggese does have some experience there. You wonder if he could get enough reps at Memphis to be at least a viable backup candidate. (That’s a question for all our prospect gurus like Kyle Reis and Blake Newberry, though.)

Again, you can’t fault the Cardinals for wanting to get things locked up and it’s commendable that they didn’t go out any longer than the two years that they were (probably) going to have Edman anyway. I’m sure part of my unease is the fact that the Cards have often given out extensions they didn’t need to (Matt Carpenter, Miles Mikolas the first time, Jordan Walden, etc.) but the fact that this isn’t going to get into Edman’s free agent years sets it somewhat apart from those deals.

It’s a fine deal for a fine offseason. It just doesn’t move the needle much, which we’re kinda getting used to it seems.

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The trailer for the third season of The Bad Batch is out and it promises an intriguing season is on its way.

So many great cameos but the one at the end is the most surprising. If you are Star Wars obsessive like myself, you know that Asajj Ventress died in the book Dark Disciple, which was based on unfilmed scripts for The Clone Wars, which shut down when Disney took over Lucasfilm. The book is canon, though, so the events happened. I’m very interested to see how they bring her back, especially since the powers that be have said that they are not undoing the book.

Honestly, I expected The Bad Batch later on in the year, maybe more like April, because I had been reading that Skelton Crew should be ready in the early part of the year. It was actually planned at one time to come in December of ‘23, but obviously that didn’t happen. We still haven’t even seen a trailer for it, which is surprising since one was shown at Star Wars Celebration in April of last year. There’s no particular reason to think that there’s been retooling or reworking of things, but it’d be good to know a little more about the show.

Also, if you haven’t heard enough from me this week, I’ll be one of the guests on the 100th episode of Talking About Birds. We’re recording tonight but it should be out Thursday morning.