Is it five years or eight years for Holliday?

December 15th, 2009 | by Ryan Boyer |

There have been conflicting reports regarding the Cardinals’ offer to free agent outfielder Matt Holliday.

If you ask the Post-Dispatch’s Joe Strauss, their offer is for eight years.

If you ask ESPN’s Buster Olney, their offer is for five years.

If you ask the Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Goold, it could be both.

Huh?

Goold’s reasoning for the possibility that it could be both is that the offer could be for five years, with options for another 2-3 years. Or, the offer could be for eight years, but Holliday has an opt-out clause after five years. For what its worth, Strauss’ article says the offer is “up to eight years”, so he kind of alludes to this, as well.

Olney’s article states that the Cardinals are intending to stand on their five-year offer, as they feel they aren’t “competing with a lot of teams — if any — for Holliday’s services at (that) level…” His source states that there is “not a chance” that the Yankees get involved in the bidding for Holliday.

With Boston out of the running following the signing of John Lackey and Mike Cameron and the Giants and Angels saying they aren’t interested, the Mets appear to be the only real threat, and they are already heavily involved in talks for Jason Bay. (For the record, I will never count the Yankees out of the running, but for the time being anyway, they seem to be out of it.)

I really, really hope that the offer is for a straight five years or 5-6 years and a team option or two. I would be content with eight years, but I have a feeling Holliday isn’t going to be a very good player in the last couple years of that deal. Scouts will tell you that the way to beat Holliday is with hard stuff because his bat speed isn’t all that great, and it won’t be getting any better when he’s 38.

The other major issue with committing $120+ million to Holliday is what it will do for the rest of the team. Albert Pujols is probably going to get $200 million in an extension. Can the Cardinals really afford to spend that much on two players, particularly when you have Chris Carpenter, Kyle Lohse and Adam Wainwright already locked into big deals, as well? Or worse yet, could the commitment to Holliday price the team out of the ability to extend Pujols?