Corey Seager comes up a lot in relation to the coming lockout because it was his shockingly large 10-year, $325 million contract – together with teammate Marcus Semien’s 7-year, $175 million contract signed at roughly the same time – that because the avatar for “oh, wow, teams are doing crazy stuff ahead of the lockout!” concept at this time five years ago. Each player was considered near the top of a particularly high middle infield class that year, but each wound up getting FAR more than most were expecting. It was seen as a sign, and that more or less turned out to prove accurate.
But this discussion isn’t really about another Seager-like explosion of early big contracts before the lockout.
Seager’s name has popped up in a lot of trade speculation about how the Rangers clear their books a bit following the wave of spending that his signing kicked off. So he’s again back in the headlines.
But this discussion isn’t really about a particular Seager trade rumor, though I will point to one as the predicate for why I’m writing anything at all:
t.co/InHhYamLzx Column: Yankees should trade for Corey Seager and solve two issues
— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) November 9, 2026Corey Seager, 33 in April, has five more years left on his deal and hasn’t topped 102 games in three years, and hasn’t topped 123 games since 2022. His bat was way down in 2026, too, though he still plays a solid shortstop. I can see why the Yankees might want him (even at third base, as Heyman suggests), because the bat perhaps bounces back if he can stay healthy (he had surgery to remove bone spurs last month).
Get into any of those specifics as much as you like, but that’s not really what struck me about the whole situation.
Instead, I was struck by the relationship between the expiring Collective Bargaining Agreement and contracts like Seager’s, with its five years of $31.5 million AAV remaining.
In the present environment, we suggest things like the Yankees taking on that deal pretty casually. Sure, adding an aging guy at a $31.5M AAV might mean the Yankees stay well over the Luxury Tax for a number of years, but they can afford it. They’ve been doing it without issue for a long time. It’s just money.
… but will the present environment stay the present environment? No one knows!
Imagine a world where, after an ugly battle, the sides agree on a new CBA that imposes dramatically more strict baseball penalties on team’s over the Luxury Tax? Or, even more, what if the owners get their wish and have a cap implemented? Suddenly, it wouldn’t look too smart to have just imported an oft-injured, coming-off-surgery 33-year-old whose contract will eat up 1/8 of your cap space for the next five years!
Whatever you might call Corey Seager’s remaining contract today, I can assure you, it would look EGREGIOUSLY bad in an environment with a salary cap well below $300 million. Heck, the Yankees are already looking at a $300 million payroll for 2027 BEFORE THEY MAKE ANY ADDITIONS. If there were no phase-in for the cap, or even if there were one grandfathering year as the owners have proposed, the Yankees would be absolutely brutalized by Seager’s contract in 2028-2031 if they took it on now.
Now, are there ways to mitigate risk? Of course. You can bake certain other bad contracts or dollars eaten into the trade, but, of course, at that point the Rangers start to question why they’re doing this in the first place.
The specifics of the Yankees, the Rangers, and Corey Seager, moreover, are beside the point.
My main point here is that, when it comes to trading for certain kinds of contracts (or signing others), there are pretty clearly deals that aren’t going to make sense until teams know what the CBA looks like mostly because a salary cap is plausibly on the table. This is not the same as 2021, when everyone knew a cap was unequivocally not coming. Harsher luxury tax penalties? Maybe. But not a cap.
To be sure, I don’t know that a cap is definitely coming this time around, either, but I guarantee you the sense around baseball is much closer to “it’s plausible this time” than “it’s definitely not happening again.” That plausibility is going to mean that teams have to behave differently this month than they did in 2021, in particular when it comes to very-high-dollar, very-risky, older-player acquisitions.
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