Benintendi and cash should do it.

They would regret that. Benintendi will be hitting .300 with nearly 200 hits a year for six years after Giancarlo is done.

Stanton says no to Boston?

awesome

I prefer the better, younger player. I believe that is Stanton.

If getting Stanton means bye to Benintendi, I have no problem with that.

Martinez is asking for a crippling deal that would pay him $30 mil thru till he is 37.

Came from a Boston writer with close ties to the team.

National reporter's say thst Stanton is keeping every option open.


Sounds like a Red Sox leak because they don't want to give up something for Stanton.


Which I hate.

We have seen what the ceiling is for the team filled with 20 home run hitters who run the bases well.


92 wins, a division title and a swift October exit.

There is less than 1% chance of Stanton opting out of that deal

Hard to see him opting out of $210 million in 2021, but that's a fair concern.


It's a win now move, for sure.


A deal they have to do, IMO. They cant waste Chris Sales prime like they wasted Pedros.

He'll be turning 32 when he can opt out. I highly doubt he would opt out and hope for 7/210 somewhere else.. Then again Boston has run a lot of guys out of town so... maybe!

This is not a rumors website; we deal in hard facts around here. But I can’t shake the feeling that part of the reason Moore didn’t raise more of a stink about letting the Braves job go by without so much as an official interview (do grow up, of course they had some back-room, off-the-record discussions) is that David Glass not-so-subtly let him know that the purse strings will be loosened, allowing Moore to rain Benjamin’s down on at least (or most?) one of his homegrown talents.

Whoever that might be (head says Moustakas, heart says Hosmer, the parts of me that values being cost-effective say Cain), it’s going to touch off what one hopes will be a round of much-needed spending in the draft, on international players and player development.

LAKE BUENA VISTA — Tampa Bay Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg said Wednesday that the team is "genuinely excited" about the proposed Ybor City site for a new stadium and more than "cautiously optimistic" the project can be completed.

But he also provided a glimpse of the bigger challenge of paying for it, suggesting that based on initial projections the team might only cover $150 million of the projected $800 million cost.

In speaking specifically for the first time about the site pitched last month by Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan, Sternberg told the Tampa Bay Times:

• The Rays had input and feel the site "looked clearly" to be the best of the workable Hillsborough options.

• Their contribution to the project will be based on projections of how much their revenues would increase, and could end up being higher or lower than the $150 million.

• They need to see support from the community in terms of commitments for season tickets and sponsorships, hoping to increase both by at least 50 percent.

• The stadium needs to have a roof of some kind, whether retractable, fixed or something else being determined by the overall budget.

• While working on the Hillsborough site they "haven’t dismissed by any means" staying in St. Petersburg at a new stadium on the Tropicana Field site, but acknowledged that would be a tougher sell to Major League Baseball.

Sternberg talked about the project for more than 30 minutes before the start of the quarterly owners meetings, and his comments about the financing aspects are certain to attract the most attention.

He said several times the amount of their contribution to the public-private partnership would be based on detailed projections on increased sales of season tickets and sponsorships that were still in the works, and could be influenced by "a drive" or other public effort — such as "businesses knocking on the door" to take part — illustrating additional support, and thus proving that moving from St. Petersburg would be the catalyst.

But he also said they had enough preliminary information to use the $150 million — the same amount they were talking about committing to a failed 2008 proposal on the St. Petersburg waterfront — as a working number.

"We’ve tried to make some guestimates, some estimates on what would be prudent for us, what would give us the ability to take this step in committing to a physical place for another generation or two, and our thought process is it’s probably in the $150 million range," Sternberg said. "We might find out that’s too much. We might find out that we can afford more."

At just $150 million, that would leave Hagan and area government and business leaders to come up with the rest, at least $650 million. With no appetite for a tax increase to pay for a stadium? Like the sales tax referendum that built Raymond James Stadium? It will take a creative cocktail of financing mechanisms.

Options include taxes collected from hotels, rental cars, and food and drinks sold near the stadium on game days, plus leveraging the expected growth in property taxes as a result of development around the ballpark.

At Wednesday’s Hillsborough County Commission meeting, Hagan acknowledged negotiations over who will pay for the new digs could take a year and won’t be easy.

"I don’t know if we’ll ever get there," Hagan said.

Andrew McCutchen to the Seattle Mariners



McCutchen almost certainly won’t be on the move this offseason; his contract expires after next year, and the Pirates will likely hold onto him until the trade deadline. Still, it would be fun if they did deal him now, while nothing else is going on to take our minds off the gathering winter and the news. Seattle’s a good fit to be a buyer for McCutchen at the deadline, and a full year of him in center would do helpful things for Ben Gamel and Mitch Haniger. Not to mention the Seattle offense — McCutchen hasn’t been an MVP the past two seasons, but he’s been a very useful bat considering where he plays on the diamond.

Matt Harvey to the Los Angeles Angels

Harvey needs out of New York; even with Terry Collins’s retirement and Mickey Callaway’s arrival, the relationship between the Mets and their former ace hit some places in 2017 it can probably never really come back from — once you start sending off-duty cops to “check up” on a guy, you’ve probably said all that needs to be said. Harvey’s disaster of a year on the mound won’t help his trade value, but the good news for the Angels is they don’t have much worth trading right now anyway. If he can bounce back in a new setting — and his arm and shoulder aren’t catastrophically, permanently out of action — he could be one of the guys who helps Mike Trout finally see some regular postseason action. Or he could go the way most Angels pitching pickups do and post an 87 ERA+ or so.