Last week I talked about the Diamondbacks and the salary difficulties they have looming on the horizon. In the piece I posited that one approach which could be adopted to help offset some of those difficultes would be to start aggressively evaluating the current roster of players in order to find the best candidates for early extension of contracts, the sorts of players that the Diamondbacks could save money on by providing long-term security to in exchange for a discounted rate by buying out arbitration (and possibly even early free agency years) before arbitration even becomes a possibility.
In the world of baseball, where all contracts are guaranteed, there is always risk when signing players to big money, or to multiple years.