From the moment it was announced that the Orioles had signed Tyler O’Neill it was inevitable that Anthony Santander would be wearing another uniform this season. So when it was announced on Monday that Santander had signed with the Blue Jays it wasn’t a shock but the ensuing contract numbers that came out were disappointing to me for a few reasons.
I don’t want to be naive and just throw a tantrum because a player I like didn’t get signed. I understand that even with a new owner the team has financial limitations and there is certainly a point where the price/years on a Santander contract would make it a bad deal for the Orioles and when there was an early report that he could get 7 years 150 million it seemed like a smart move to let him walk at that price.
So when the O’s “jumped the market” as Scott Boras said to pay Tyler O’Neill 16.5 Million a year I assumed that the Orioles had spoken extensively to Santander’s agent and maybe with some other teams and determined that the price for Santander would be way above what they were willing to pay.
If Santander was going to make 20 something million dollars for 6-7 years then you can see the logic that says that Tyler O’Neill at a much lower price on a shorter deal could be a smarter investment for a team not looking to tie up their 2028 payroll.
However Santander did not sign a 7 year 150 million dollar contract or anything close to that. Here are the contract details for the contract Santander signed with the Blue Jays:
5 years – 92.5 Million dollars
Signing bonus – 13.5 Million (6.75 Million deferred)
2025: 13.5 Million with 10 million deferred
2026: 16.5 Million with 10 million deferred
2027: 16.5 Million with 10 million deferred
Player option after the 2027 season
2028: 14.75 Million with 10 million deferred
2029: 12.75 Million with 10 million deferred
2030: 15 Million – Club option that the team can pick up to void the 2027 player option or pay 5 million to buy out.
I had to stare at these details for a while to get them to make sense to me. As I understand it the signing bonus and the club option buyout make up 18.5 million of the 92.5 million on his contract making it so the Jays have to pay him 74 million over the 5 years and 50 million of that 74 million is deferred. Making the present value of the contract 68.6 million dollars.
In an effort to be fair I am not going to wave it in the Orioles face that the next year 5 years the Blue Jays will pay Santander about 30 million while the Orioles pay Tyler O’Neill about 50 because the deferrals are a double edged sword so when I talk about this contract I am going to refer to the pre deferral number.
Basically the Blue Jays are getting Santander for the next three years (what I’d assume will be the rest of his prime) for under 20 million a year. If anyone had signed Santander to a 3 year deal worth less than 60 million that would have been recognized as a really good deal and if I were Ross Atkins I would feel confident that I am going to get my money’s worth on that part of the contract. In fact if I were Ross Atkins I would be banking on most of the value from this contract in the first 3 years and then view whatever you get on the back end as a bonus.
The next part of the deal is where Toronto takes a little bit of risk. If Santander is still awesome after 3 years he can opt out and hit free agency assuming the Blue Jays don’t lock him in by picking up the club option. If Santander has slowed down or is washed by then he will opt in to the last 2 years of the contract and the Blue Jays will be stuck paying him an average of 13.75 million a year.
This deal has very little downside, Santander has been one of the most bankable power hitters in baseball over the last 3 years and should continue to be for the next three. I mentioned the possibility that by the last 2 years of the deal he could be washed but Santander’s game isn’t based on speed or athleticism so even if he takes a step back he should still be able to hit enough through his age 34-35 seasons that paying him 13.75 million won’t cripple your team.
I would argue that 13.75 million is a small enough number that even if Santander took a tropical vacation during the last year of the deal that it wouldn’t hurt the Blue Jays that much. Last year the Orioles paid Craig Kimbrel 13 million to be the worst pitcher I’ve ever seen and they survived.
There is always the possibility of injury making this an albatross contract but if Santander is going to get hurt early in this contract then it would have been a bad deal no matter how much he signed for.
Transitioning back to the Orioles let’s look at their Anthony Santander replacement contract
3 years 49.5 million
2025: 16.5
Player option that cannot be voided
2026: 16.5
2027: 16.5
This is a shorter deal than what Santander got but when you look at the risk I believe there is much more.
To start there is an opt out after 1 year, so if Tyler O’Neill outperforms the 16.5 million AAV the Orioles have him at then he will opt out and search for a new deal. Inversely, and much more likely, if Tyler O’Neill is hurt and underperforms the 16.5 million then he is going to opt in to those last 2 years and the Oriole will be stuck paying him.
So over the next 3 years the Blue Jays get Santander and the Orioles will maybe have Tyler O’Neill. So then the question is “Is Santander worth more than Tyler O’Neill over the next 3 years?”
I’d have to say yes.
Here is a comparison over the last 3 seasons
Santander is better in every way that matters. Obviously he has the counting stats because he’s been healthy and available and an everyday player no matter what hand the pitcher throws with but he also has the rate stats besides OBP (and that’s close) which is especially impressive because O’Neill is a platoon hitter so he gets to juice his stats by avoiding bad matchups.
In addition to being an inferior hitter O’Neill is also a worse defender than Santander and Santander isn’t even good at defense. Also O’Neill is only 10 months younger than Sanatander so it’s not like there isn’t an equal risk of a decline as he progresses through his early thirties. Add both of those tidbits to the fact that O’Neill has an extensive injury history and according to my calculations the Orioles are 10x more likely to regret their corner outfield power hitter signing than the Blue Jays.
On top of the fact that swapping out Santander for O’Neill is a downgrade both offensively and defensively there is also leadership deficit between the two players, Santander was someone that everyone in the clubhouse looked up to, especially the latin players and as long as we are talking about intangible reasons to sign a player I think it would have been good for some of the young guys to see the team pay someone who played well for the team. There is value in players feeling like the team they are playing for values them and will pay them rather than feeling like a pawn in the front office’s game who is going to churn them over for prospects once they hit arb 2 and replace them with the guy they got with a comp pick for letting the guy before them walk.
Before I move on I want to address some of the points Orioles fans have brought up in defense of not signing Anthony Santander.
“That’s too much money for a DH”
First of all no it’s not if it’s the kind of DH that can hit 40 bombs in a season. Secondly Santander is not a DH he started 129 games in the outfield last season, Adley Rutschman was more of a DH than Anthony Santander was. Santander’s defense is not good but it’s better than O’Neill, Kjerstad and O’Hearn so no matter who the main replacement is in right field next year the Orioles are going to be worse defensively in 2025 than they were in 2024.
“The Kjerstad and O’Neill platoon will outproduce Santander”
Maybe maybe not. O’Neill is hurt all of the time and as much as I like Kjerstad he is far from a sure thing and also has managed to miss time due to health reasons even if they are freak things like a heart condition or a concussion. I can easily foresee a year where O’Neill plays 60 games and Kjerstad has very normal young player struggles and they get out produced by Sanatnder by a mile. Even if they both stay healthy and hit 20 bombs each Santander might hit 40 and match them.
Also the idea of 2 players making up for 1 is flawed because the value from the roster spot you get from not having a platoon is also valuable so it shouldn’t be thought of as Kjerstad and O’Neill or Santander it should be thought of as Kjerstad and O’Neill or Santander and another player who would help the Orioles win games.
“We couldn’t give Santander this contract because we need to save money to extend our young core”
To start with this one let’s see a single extension get done before we give Mike Elias credit for “saving up for extensions”. Assuming that Sanatnder would have taken this exact deal minus the deferrals with the Orioles, by the time guys like Gunnar, Westburg and Cowser are finishing arbitration Santander would be making at most 14.75 Million which is not a prohibitive amount. Elias has handed out a 1 year deal in low teens that ended up being somewhere between a zero value add and a disaster every year. Last year it was Kimbrel at 13 million, the year before that it was Kyle Gibson and his ERA of 5. Would you feel much worse if the Orioles hadn’t signed Charlie Morton? Because that’s what having Santander under contract in 2028 would cost you. If someone tries to tell you that having Santander under contract for 14.8 million makes it impossible to extend Jordan Westburg that is not the truth.
“Santander is a .194 career hitter at Rogers Centre”
This one isn’t so much a reason for the Orioles to not have signed him as it is an annoying comment I saw people making to make it seem like this was a bad deal for the Blue Jays. I couldn’t care less about a 27 game sample dating back to 2018 and I would bet any amount of money that Santander will not hit .194 in Toronto as a Blue Jay.
Santander is on the Blue Jays so what is the point of all of this talk?
At the end of the day this isn’t an earth shattering move for the Orioles or the Blue Jays. With or without Santander the Orioles will make the playoffs this year and the Blue Jays will finish just under .500. After all this is a 2.5 WAR player we are talking about here. So why bother being upset that the O’s chose to pay Tyler O’Neill instead of Anthony Santander?
The point is that we need to acknowledge that the Orioles front office did a bad job with their biggest moves this offseason. They misread the market on Santander and O’Neill and ended up paying the riskier and worse player almost as much on an annual basis.
It is ok to make mistakes, no front office bats 1.000 but to me the problem is that the front office does not view this series of transactions as a mistake. I’m sure when the Santander deal was announced they were doing cartwheels in the warehouse because they avoided having to commit to paying someone in 2028.
The Orioles front office is smart and careful and they have set up the roster so that they have a lot of talent and no bad contracts weighing down their books. They are set up to be flexible and aggressive in shaping their roster over the next few years but the question is are they going to take advantage of that or just keep kicking the can down the road and bragging about how flexible their payroll is and how strong their farm system is.
I hope they do and that all of the negativity is misplaced but Santander was their first chance to pay someone who had done well for them as part of a winning core and they bailed on him as soon as they could.
The Dishwasher 
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