With the calendar turned to “After the Landis” and another classic October flame out in the record books, Melissa Lester, the co-voice of the Nine,and co-host of the Nine-Talk fauxcast, sat down with YS9 catcher Aaron Stone to talk about his situation and how he came to the decision to opt-out of the last year of his current contract.
An excerpt of the conversation follows. To hear the rest, chase down the latest edition of the podcast.
Lester: Welcome aboard, Aaron.
Stone: Thanks. Where are the beer nuts?
Lester: (laughs) I’m sure we’ve got some around here somewhere.
Stone: They said there would be beer nuts.
Lester sends a flunky to go find some beer nuts.
Lester: All right, with that started, maybe we can talk about the season just past, all right?
Stone: (shrugs)
Lester: It was a good one for you personally, 27 homers and a slash that includes a .392 on-base percentage.
Stone: Yep.
Lester: Totaling up to 4.7 WAR
Stone: That’s what they tell me. I guess that’s pretty good.
Lester: What are you most proud of?
Stone: Well, you know, that’s hard to say. I mean, we didn’t win, so it kinda puts a bummer blanket on the whole thing. But I guess mostly I was happy with the fact that I threw out more than 30% of the guys stealing.
Lester: Really?
Stone: Everyone says my defense sucks, but it was pretty okay last year.
Lester: (digging through reports) I’ll be damned.
Stone: No reason to go that far.
Attendant returns with beer nuts. Stone digs in.
Lester: I wanted to talk a little about your contract.
Stone: Shoot away.
Lester: You were due for $14M again next year, but you decided to forego that to put yourself on the market. Can you talk about the process that ran up to your decision?
Stone: Mostly it was Uncle Morty sayin’ I could get more than $14M.
Lester: Uncle Morty?
Stone: He’s a smart dude. Brought me this thing called arithmetic that I guess the teach in schools these days.
Lester: Arithmetic? Seriously?
Stone: Yeah, you should look it up. I mean, he laid it out so good you could hardly believe it. He said, Aaron, son, you know that the Nine get to spend $110M on their whole team, right? And I said I thought I heard that somewhere, so he showed me how, if you use this Arithmetic, you can take me outta the equation and see the Nine would be paying $88M.
Lester: I see.
Stone: But here’s the tricky part! (leans in) If you use this arithmetic thing another time, you find out that $110M take away 88M is—
Lester: $22M.
Stone: Shitfire, you’re quick.
Lester: Thanks,I think.
Stone: Can you say shitfire on the air?
Lester: I think you’re fine.
Stone: Anyway, that’s when Uncle Morty said we’d ask the Nine for $21M a year for about as far as we could see. No reason to be greedy, Morty said. We leave ‘em a mill to pay for McNeill’s kid to be the bat boy or something.
Lester: That’s generous.
Stone: Morty’s just built like that, I guess. Used to always let us kids have a sip of his beer after we’d fetched him one.
Lester: You’ll be 31 years old, next year, though. Do you think teams will be willing to go the whole six seasons on a deal like that?
Stone: (scratches his chin). What do you mean?
Lester: Do you think GMs around the league are willing to take that kind if risk?
Stone: Last I saw there were more than a few bragging about bringing truckload of cash to the winter meetings.
Lester: Fair point.
Stone: Morty called it a combination of cock fight and a pickle measuring contest.
Lester: (Laughs) Oh my.
Stone: Said he was gonna find which was the dill and which would go full polski wyrob.
Lester: (Laughs again)
Stone: Either way, $21M buys a lot of pickle.
Lester: (collecting herself) I’m sure it does.
Stone: At least that’s what Uncle Morty says.
.512 SLG (5)
.868 OPS (4)
29 WAR (6)
229 2B (7)
222 HR (4)
438 BB (8)