What Adrian Beltre deal means for Blue Jays, Bautista, Encarnacion

As the Toronto Blue Jays continue their drawn-out contract situations with both Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, a key factor to negotiations will be finding the proper comparable players to base these talks around.

In Encarnacion’s case, for example, the current four-year, $68 million contract between Victor Martinez and the Detroit Tigers could act as a floor to work upwards from, as Edwin is both younger and more consistently productive than Martinez at this point in his career.

More recently, enter Adrian Beltre. The 37-year-old Texas Rangers star recently signed a two-year contract extension worth $36 million. In 2016, Beltre is playing in the final year of a six-year, $96 million deal.

The open market continues to grow richer with each passing season, but within the current scope, the details of this contract don’t exactly operate in Bautista’s favour.

Perhaps the easiest way to frame it is this: It’s more likely that the Blue Jays bring up the Beltre contract in negotiations than Bautista’s representatives.

On one hand, Beltre has defied age and continued to be extremely productive offensively into his late-30s. Just 18 months older than Bautista, Beltre also continues to offer excellent value defensively (an area in which Bautista is experiencing regression).

Over the past five seasons (2011 – 2015), Beltre has earned a 27.3 fWAR compared to a mark of 26.2 from Bautista. Beltre holds advantages over Bautista when it comes to batting average and in the field, but take a backseat when it comes to on-base percentage and power numbers (though Beltre leads Bautista in RBIs over that span… 459-458).

Essentially, they’re taking two parallel roads to the same value in terms of wins above replacement.

Clearly, Jose Bautista is not on a path to an $18 million salary over two years because of Beltre’s deal. But both the term and the overall financial commitment represent something logical for a player not even two full years older than him. Logic is something that has been completely uninvolved in some Bautista-related contract rumours from earlier this spring.

Two years is out of the question for Bautista, and truthfully, even a three-year deal is unlikely (unless options and incentives can tip the balance in some unexpected way). A two-year deal like Beltre’s, however, to a player of such similar value, could help to nail Bautista into a four-year window. Besides, that would leave Bautista slightly older at the end of his extension than Beltre will be at the end of this one.

In a similar way that the years involved can weigh down negotiations on Bautista’s numbers, the $18 million annual salary can help to keep Toronto away from anything within eyesight of $26-28+ million. Or, at least it should.

So chalk this up as one grain of sand falling on the Blue Jays’ side of the scales in any coming negotiations, should they come at all.