Yeah, I'd also be pretty happy with this contract
That is the official terms of the contract that former Tigers pitcher Max Scherzer signed with the Washington Nationals. A contract that not only gives the Nats the nastiest rotation in the majors, but allows Scott Boras to say that Scherzer makes almost as much as Clayton Kershaw.
Except both those things aren't exactly true.
The second point first. While Scherzer will get paid $210M, half of that is deferred money for another seven years. So what he really gets is $15M over the next fourteen years, with his massive $50M bonus paid up front.
Now, this sounds like semantics until you take into consideration two things; inflation and the increasing money that comes from television contracts. Money today is (unless the global economy utterly collapses) worth more than money 10 years from now. And the Nationals will most likely have more money to spend in the future than they have today. So while the yearly hit over the seven year deal is somewhere in the 20s (the bonus structure isn't available yet) the financial hit isn't as extreme as you would think.
However, it is more than the Nationals were paying at this time last year. Even using a rough estimate of $22-23M (15+ 1/7 of the bonus), that is a large chunk of change that the Nats cannot use now.
Which brings us to the first point.
