As we all know, JD Drew is officially signed. His deal was finalized yesterday. The issue revolved around his injured right shoulder and the language in the contract regarding it.

It appears to me that the Red Sox have defeated Scott Boras on this issue. The Red Sox have an out clause where they can get out of at least some of the committed money if his injury remains a problem. If he spends 35 days on the DL in the third for fourth year of his contract specifically because of the right shoulder, they get out of the contract.
Though I can’t confirm this, my suspicion is that the Red Sox expect him to be injured, and are planning to excercise the out clause at some point. If this is true, it makes Theo even more of a genius. Sign a guy to a huge contract he can’t say no to knowing full well you’ll never have to pay it all. This is like when football teams offer a non-guaranteed 5th year of a deal just to jack up the contract price when they know they’ll never actually pay it.

I also suspect that Boras figured this out and is why he was arguing for so long about the ‘language’ of the contract. He probably figured out too late that Drew probably won’t get paid the full amount becuase obviously, he will be injured. I will take my assumption one step further and speculate that the Red Sox wanted the out clause to be for the full length of the contract, and Boras was trying to make it more specific to ensure more of the contract gets paid.

Who else besides me is routing for a shoulder injury?

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Big News!, General Postings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.