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Baseball’s last massive payday arrived on Wednesday, this time in the form of Fernando Tatis Jr.’s $ 340 million extension for 14 years with the San Diego Padres.
The deal is the longest in baseball history, the third in terms of total amount committed, and will keep a potential face for MLB in San Diego for the long haul. It’s a transformative deal for the Padres and the league as a whole. Tatis, however, will not be able to enjoy it as much as you would like.
The reason: a deal he made when he was 19, more than a year before his MLB debut.
What is Big League Advance and why is it part of Fernando Tatis’ contract?
As Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal noted on Thursday, part of Tatis’ deal with the Padres will go to Big League Advance, a company with a very specific business model, and some would say predatory.
Essentially Big League Advance is an investment company, but instead of investing in businesses and properties, it invests in players. The company approaches the Minor Leaguers and offers them a one-time payment in exchange for a small but significant reduction in their earnings as an MLB player.
If the Minor Glimmer’s career doesn’t play out and he never makes it to MLB’s lucrative free agency, it’s a good deal for the player. However, if that player, for example, becomes an MVP candidate and signs one of the biggest contracts in baseball history, that’s a godsend for Big League Advance.
This is exactly what will happen in the case of Tatis, who reportedly signed a deal with Big League Advance during the 2017-18 offseason. The exact amount Tatis will hand over to Big League Advance is unknown, but the company’s website offers the following compensation structure as an example:
For example, Big League Advance can offer a player $ 50,000 for every 1% of their future professional earnings. If a player wanted to sign a 5% deal he would get $ 250,000, or if he wanted to sign a 10% deal he would get $ 500,000. Although the amounts of our offers are not negotiable, the percentage that the player wishes to give up is at the player’s discretion.
So if Tatis took the biggest payment, he would be willing to pay Big League Advance $ 34 million over 14 years. Not every player Big League Advance buys from will be majors, but the ability to land an escape player like Tatis seems worth it.
Tatis signed the deal for a reason
Obviously, not many people are going to feel bad for Tatis about this deal. Even after Big League Advance and its agents take their cuts, he will still have enough money to live in luxury for the rest of his life. At the same time, however, it may be worth discussing how a player who seems to have been marked for greatness for years would sign a deal that could cost him as much as $ 34 million.
For starters, the timing of Tatis’ Big League Advance deal is important. During the 2017-18 offseason, Tatis had just completed a season spent mainly in Class A ball, plus 14 Double-A games. He was still a true hope – MLB Pipeline ranked him as # 4 in the San Diego system and # 52 overall – but he wasn’t Fernando Tatis Jr., baseball shredder and bat pinball machine.
At this point, Tatis was best known for being the Padres’ return to the James Shields trade, which has since become infamous among Chicago White Sox fans.
More importantly, Tatis still earned a minor league salary, which was and remains shockingly low for entry-level MLB player base employees. The salary scale for Class A players in 2017 was $ 1,300 per month, and only for the months of the season. Tatis received a $ 700,000 signing bonus with the White Sox as an international prospect in 2015, but working to become an elite player is expensive, and Tatis told Rosenthal that’s what his payout is for. anticipated from the Big League:
[Tatis] said after signing with BLA that he wanted to hire a personal trainer, eat better, and get a better apartment. He used that money to improve not only his training regime in the United States, but also his off-season training ground in his native Dominican Republic.
It might also be worth wondering why the Padres weren’t paying for their No.4 prospect to get the training and nutrition he wanted, but let’s face it, we all know the answer. MLB teams will fight tooth and nail to avoid giving their less powerful employees more than the bare minimum, and giving a guy like Tatis the resources he wants would be an admission for them, not an investment.
Again, Tatis won’t suffer much from this, although the MLB Players’ Association won’t be happy to watch this game. Tatis knew it was a possibility, telling Rosenthal he saw it just as a price. negligible if his career took off:
“If I’m a good player and earn a lot of money, I’m not going to worry about giving that money away,” he said. “It will be nothing if I earn that much money.”
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