Your 2024 Giants: Snellzilla Signed!

As reported widely, the Giants signed Blake Snell to a two-year contract for $62M, with an opt out.  They also split each season's contract roughly in half, with half paid one season, the rest paid as bonus two years later, spreading the cash flow over the next four years, essentially.  

Your 2024 Giants: The Modern MLB Rotation Chaos Portfolio Theory

The Modern MLB Rotation Chaos Portfolio Theory is the name I've given Farhan Zaidi's management style for modern MLB rotations, which is basically, letting chaos reign, but ending up with a good starting pitching success.

I've derived the name from my finance training, cribbing from the Modern Portfolio Theory.  From Corporate Finance Institute:  The Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) refers to an investment theory that allows investors to assemble an asset portfolio that maximizes expected return for a given level of risk. The theory assumes that investors are risk-averse; for a given level of expected return, investors will always prefer the less risky portfolio."  

The idea behind this theory is that one can create a portfolio of assets that are high risk, but with sufficiently independent industries and market factors, the overall risk of the portfolio is much lower, because, under this theory, one industry going down is just as likely as another going up, and thus the risks cancel each other out, reducing the risk of the overall portfolio.

The idea for the Modern MLB Rotation Chaos Portfolio Theory is similar in concept, in that the risk of any particular pitcher being injured or not very good may be high, but when you have enough pitchers on your team who are projected to be good (in this case, better than the NL SP average ERA of 4.56) when healthy, your 162 starts per season is covered by your portfolio of potentially injured, but usually good, starting pitchers.  

Your 2024 Giants: Signed Matt Chapman to. 1-year, 2-year, 3-year or 4-year Contract

I just realized I should post on the signing of Matt Chapman (sorry, been busy dealing with leaking pipes ruining walls and engine mounts failing on my car...).  Per NBC Sports,

2024: $16 million salary, plus $2 million signing bonus

2025: $17 million player option or a $2 million buyout

2026: $18 million player option or a $3 million buyout

2027: $20 million mutual option or $1 million buyout

 So, here are the scenarios as far as I can tell:

• It's $20M if he opts out after one year ($18M plus $2M buyout)
• It's $38M if he opts out after two years ($18M /$17M plus $3M buyout)
• It's $54M if he opts out after three years ($18M/$17M/$18$ plus $1M buyout) or if the Giants buy him out to void the fourth year
• It's $73M if he stays the full four years

Whew!  It can cover his 31-34 YO seasons, depending on the opt out/ins.  Based on $8M/WAR, that's 2.5 WAR in 2024, 2.25 WAR in 2025, 2.0 WAR in 2026, and 2.4 WAR in 2027, for a total of 9.15 WAR to be produced in the four seasons.