Tanner wrote:The Shoemaker situation is weird. They want him to take a 1+1 deal where he would have to take a pay cut and have a team option on the first year of his free agency. There is basically no incentive for him to do that when he can simply go to arbitration and get more. The downside for him would be getting non tendered, and then not having any offers totaling $3m, but still seems like an unusual ask by the Jays when all he wants is $500k more than they are offering and the same salary he made last year when he had one of the highest War's on the team despite only making 5 starts all year.
Depends on how it's structured. A 1+1 with incentives and some buyout money for 2021 might make a fair bit of sense for Shoemaker, simply because his age/injury history means that he isn't going to parlay a good season into much more than a better one-year deal. A fully unguaranteed 2021 probably means that he has more incentive to be non-tendered and take the risk though.
The point of comparison is really his 2019 deal. He took $3.5m + $1m in fairly hard-to-reach incentives based on IP, where the risk/reward was heavily skewed against him...he'd get cut if he failed, and as a final-year arb guy he probably wasn't going to get a massive raise in his final season. It wasn't substantially different from a 1+1 in all but name, and after another year where he suffered a major (albeit not arm) injury I wouldn't imagine that he will get much more. $3m + $1m in bonuses + a $5m option with a $250k buyout or something isn't a bad option for a guy who last pitched more than a third of a season in 2015.
