The San Diego Padres shocked MLB today by signing Manny Machado to a 10 year 300 million dollar contract. Previous estimates had their offer around 250 million over 7 years. The signing poses a number of questions about how we got to these numbers, why would the Pads do this and why would Manny do this? So let’s tackle them one at a time.
The first question is why would San Diego make this type of offer? They aren’t real contenders in the NL and Machado is not going to suddenly make them the favorites, more like a possible wild card contender at best.