Pre-Arbitration Contracts, National League

Looking across a variety of sites and message boards that carried my last article, free agent vs pre arbitration, it appears that some people misinterpreted the article.

Most likely they read the headline, and assumed that the basic conclusion was Sizemore is better than Soriano due to his contract situation. That was not the case. I was simply comparing two players with similar statistics, and what happens when a team uses forward thinking to lock the player up, as opposed to gaining the players services in the free agent market.

The Rockies get it,

as reports have leaked to them by-passing Jeff Francis’ final pre-arb year, and signing him to a 4 year – $13 million deal, with an option for a fifth year. After his stellar 2006, if Francis was in this years free agent market he would probably come close to pulling in $13 million for one season, let alone four.

Here’s a player from each NL team–with more than one year of major league experience–that teams should consider signing now. Most of the players on this list—but not all—would most likely agree to a deal along the lines of Victor Martinez’s (.300 hitting Catcher in Cleveland), which is 5 years at $15 million, with an option for a sixth. Others, like Cain and Howard should demand something along the lines of a Sizemore (6 at $24) or even a David Wright (6 at $55) type deal. If a team has a question mark beside it, it means that the player has less than a year’s worth of MLB experience.