Imagine a very orderly person who lives in an apartment with a very large dog. The two can coexist happily, with each providing necessary support to the other, but there is also going to be a tension inherent to that relationship grounded in the fact that one of the parties to it is forever lining things up and optimizing and re-optimizing counter space and the other is a very large dog, and as such will knock things over simply due to being a very large dog. This is not an argument against continuing to line things up just so, of course. It just means that the very orderly person will over time become a very familiar face to the people at The Container Store, to the point where they might remark to each other during their breaks about having seen him, again, purchasing more of those stackable, breakable containers that he's always getting.
This is probably not the best way to understand the interplay between New York Mets President of Baseball Operations David Stearns and team owner Steve Cohen. The relationship is much more prosaic, really, and fairly common to the world of finance, where Cohen became rich enough to buy the Mets; it boils down to that between an impulsive and very rich boss and a high-performing employee whom the impulsive boss trusts but will still sometimes overrule when bored or aggravated or just moved to do so. There is no reason why these two parties can't coexist, and the two both help and need each other in meaningful ways. But there is still going to be a mess every now and then.
It is not quite accurate to say that the MLB offseason had been process-forward until Kyle Tucker signed a four-year, $240 million free agent deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday evening. Different teams have different processes, as well they should, and the few teams that had ponied up for high-end talent were not just doing so because they had pivoted to Very Large Dog mode. When the Mets, who were along with the Toronto Blue Jays reportedly co-runners up for Tucker's services, signed the former Jays shortstop Bo Bichette to an astonishingly player-friendly three-year, $126 million deal on Friday, it was probably somewhat closer to Very Large Dog behavior; the Mets will lose their first-round pick next year as a result of signing a player to what amounts to what amounts to a one-year, $42 million contract to (reportedly) play third base, a position he has never played in the majors. But if this is not something that the patient and process-oriented Stearns would ordinarily do, it is also not happening in a vacuum. It is happening, instead, in the stupid part of baseball's free agency period.
It is the nature of baseball's semi-free market that the price of premium talent always goes up, and the nature of free agency in general that a team that takes a scrupulously rational approach to each free agent will tend to be the team that finishes third in the bidding for every free agent. The deals that had seemed like possible overpays—Dylan Cease's seven-year deal with the Blue Jays, say, or Pete Alonso's five-year deal with the Orioles—should be judged in those teams' specific contexts, and will over time come to look like bargains in relative terms.
This may wind up being the case for Tucker, too. Accounting for the $30 million in deferrals in Tucker's deal, his average annual salary of $57 million is significantly more than Shohei Ohtani or Juan Soto receive through their own (previously) record-setting deals. Tucker is a very good player when he is on the field, if not in the same universe as either Ohtani or Soto, but the more important point is that he was the best offensive player on the free agent market both this year and, by most reckonings, the closest thing to a superstar free agent hitter that the sport is likely to see until Gunnar Henderson reaches the market, or doesn't, in 2029.
That, or that plus everything that comes with being the Los Angeles Dodgers—two straight World Series wins, a lineup deep enough for even a Kyle Tucker type to settle in comfortably as a relatively anonymous superstar cog among other superstar cogs, the money to afford all that—helps explain what led the Dodgers to blow those other offers out of the water. Adding Tucker fills a relative dead spot for the Dodgers in left field, and prevents the Mets and Blue Jays from making marginal improvements to weak spots of their own; if money is no object, and considering that the luxury tax the Dodgers will pay on Tucker's contract will bump his annual cost into the nine figures it seems safe to say that it isn't, it is an eminently sensible move.
But it was also enough of a shock on the merits to jar the teams white-knuckling through process-driven offseasons into fits of big-spending irrationality. This sort of thing tends to go in waves; the Phillies' decision to bring back catcher J.T. Realmuto on a three-year deal should be understood at least in part as a response to missing out on Bichette, to whom they'd been linked on a much longer contract; somewhere down the line, this will probably make Cody Bellinger slightly richer, for slightly longer. The concentric waves of sudden and urgent irrationality emanating outwards from the crater left by the Tucker contract will not supplant or upend the various processes at work in the league's front offices, really, but it has already given them a vigorous jostle.
More than that, the move has signaled that the time for patiently waiting for the market to develop is over; the market has developed, and it is as preposterous as it is every offseason. The Mets' offseason has made some fans sad, but it had also been a series of intelligent and intelligently hedged moves that, taken cumulatively, remade a roster that badly needed to be remade; there is no reason to believe that Stearns or the very large and very rich dog with which he lives are going to abandon that. But the deal they offered to Bichette, while likely to make the team better in 2026, does clarify somewhat the question of which party is currently in charge, not just in this particular front office but across the free agent landscape. It's not a question of who is taking whom for a walk. The dog is already driving.
