What we originally envisioned was a free-for-all for the game's best free-agent outfielders, headlined by Holliday and Jason Bay and financed by all the big-market teams. Everyone from Boston to New York to L.A. would be spending like crazy, with a championship in 2010 hanging in the balance.
Yeah … not quite.
The past 48 hours have turned the whole process upside down. We've seen the Red Sox spend all their free cash on John Lackey and Mike Cameron, taking them out of the Bay/Holliday sweepstakes in all likelihood. The Angels have gone for Hideki Matsui, lessening the chances they'll need to spend big money on another hard-hitting outfielder. The Mariners, who had already taken on a ton of payroll by signing Chone Figgins, just took on a ton more by trading prospects for Cliff Lee. And the Yankees kept talking to Johnny Damon, which means a deal could very well happen eventually, once the two sides can overcome their differences.
That doesn't leave many suitors. It means that Bay, no longer the big prize for the Red Sox this offseason, will probably end up settling for the $63 million offer that the Mets gave him this weekend — and it probably means that Holliday isn't going anywhere. He should set up camp in St. Louis and make himself comfortable.
What we're hearing is that Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak picked up the phone last week and offered Scott Boras the biggest contract in franchise history for Holliday. We're talking eight years, somewhere in the neighborhood of $16 million per. It would make Holliday and Albert Pujols the best 1-2 punch in the National League.
His trial run in St. Louis was an incredible one. Holliday gave the Cards a 1.023 OPS and 13 home runs in two months in St. Louis after the trading deadline in 2009, sending his stock through the roof right before he hit the free-agent market.
Originally, we expected the Holliday bidding war to be fierce, but it's not looking that way anymore.
This isn't a sentence you usually read about Boras, but this time it's true: He has no leverage. He won't be able to pull the same nonsense he did with Mark Teixeira last offseason. You won't hear about mystery third teams, about phantom nine-year contract offers, about GMs outbidding each other on a bluff to drive up the prices for big free agents. Each GM is set in his ways this winter — the Red Sox are focused on pitching and defense, the Yankees are maintaining their status quo, and so on. Everyone has a plan, and it looks pretty clear how things will shake out.
The Cardinals have been waiting for almost a week now to get a response to the offer they tendered to Holliday last Wednesday. If he and Boras are smart, the Cards won't have to wait much longer.
A deal makes sense for everyone involved. For Holliday, it would be great to stay put in an environment where he thrived last season, with the playoff-bound Cardinals. For the Cards, it would be great to lock up the other half of their mini-Murderer's Row for the better part of the next decade. And for everyone else in baseball? No worries. They all have a plan.
And at this point, no one else is planning a major play for Holliday. If he doesn't go ahead and return to St. Louis, he's making a big mistake — because the price war we had envisioned all along just isn't happening anymore.
No, if Holliday rejects the Cardinals' offer now, his market value will trend down, not up. It was always a buyer's market, but it's even more so now.
The offer currently on the table for Holliday is a huge one. Life-changing money, just there for the taking. And if Holliday doesn't take it, he'll regret it for the rest of his life.
