Oakland Athletics To Sign Yoenis Cespedes

by Marisa Ingemi on Feb 13, 2012 12:27 PM EST in MLB Breaking News

According to Tim Brown of Yahoo! Sports, the Oakland Athletics have signed free agent Cuban outfielder Yoenis Cespedes. Cespedes has been the most coveted Cuban player this off season, and the Athletics kind of came out of nowhere to sign him.

Susan Slusser from the San Francisco Chronicle says that the deal is four years and will be worth about $36 million overall. Cespedes is 26 years old and became a free agent last month after it had been long anticipated.

As late as last night it had been reported that the Miami Marlins were the favorites for Cespedes' services, and they have been in the running the entire time. They made an offer less than $40 million, but the length of that potential deal is unknown. The Chicago Cubs were also rumored to have interest in him.

Brown also reports that Cespedes has just recently been unblocked by The Office of Foreign Assets Control.

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Somethings horribly rotten in baseball

As a result, I smell a collusion lawsuit coming on the scene. Here Oakland is screaming poverty, and yet they find the money for a deal to sign a hot Cuban free agent? Baseball truly needs a salary floor and cap.

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by Jessy S on Feb 13, 2012 1:29 PM EST reply actions

I don't know.

Even with Cespedes, they’ll still have a pretty low payroll, and they could probably argue that they wanted to jump on landing an elite young player before the new CBA restricts the club’s ability to spend on these kinds of players. A salary floor scares me, because it forces teams to spend when it’s not necessarily in their best interest, but the new CBA does certainly change things because teams can no longer simply reallocate tons of money to amateur signings like before.

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by Satchel Price on Feb 13, 2012 1:50 PM EST up reply actions

Extremely nice overall improvement here for the A's IMO

They traded the following salaries:

Cahill – $3.5 M in 2012
Gonzalez – $3.25 M in 2012 (price in his extension, MLBTR estimated him at $3.6M)
Bailey – $3.9 M in 2012 (settled price, MLBTR estimated him at $3.4M)

Total Salary of $10.65 M sent out

Cespedes will receive $6.5M in 2012 (per Susan Slusser)
Parker, Reddick, Cowgill, Peacock, Milone would all receive the minimum (or close to it), for a total of around $2.5 M for that group.

Total Salary back in around $9 M.

They have as a result cut payroll slightly at most, replaced the production at least reasonably (I think somewhere between 75-80% of Cahill/Gonzalez), and added a potential high-ceiling bat, which they desperately needed. And also added 2 solid to above-average prospects (Norris, Cole), 2 lottery ticket prospects (the other guys from Boston) as well.

I definitely think that the long-term view of the system adding Cespedes definitely looks a lot better than it did at the start of the offseason.

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by Jason Hunt on Feb 13, 2012 1:51 PM EST reply actions