Starling Marte doesn't care about money, signs with Pirates

Yesterday if you would have asked me if I think the Pirates would reach an agreement to extend Starling Marte's contract at some point during the 2014 season, I would have said absolutely not. I know that's true because Daniel Dudley asked me just that on TribLIVE Sports Radio last night.

Fortunately for us, I was wrong. The Pirates inked Marte to a 6 year, 31 million dollar deal, quite impressively at that. The deal buys out three years of his free agent years and will keep Marte with the team through the 2020 season.

If you're asking me, Marte was a bit foolish here. That's assuming that Marte cares primarily about money, which is by no means necessarily true. The guy might really love Pittsburgh and want to play here for a long time, and that's great. But it seems to me like Marte is going to be worth a lot more than $5 million a year pretty soon. There is the chance that Marte doesn't really turn out how we think he will, and in that case the Pirates may have made a mistake by jumping the gun on an unproven player, but that's pretty unlikely to happen just considering what we've seen from Marte the last three or so years.

After we heard that Marte had turned down two deals from the Pirates you really got the feeling that talks would cool off and we wouldn't hear about it again for the rest of the year, but the Pirates were cooperative and patient and got the right deal done.

The Pirates management has done a fantastic job recently. They signed a league MVP to a deal that pays him $14 million a year at the deal highest point. Now they have an all-star calibur outfield with a superstar-level ceiling to a deal that won't pay him more than $8 million a year at any point. Unreal.

I wrote this post about how the Pirates have never faced decisions like these in the past, with multiple young players that are well above average that are looking for multi-year deals. So far they've done as good a job as you can ask them.

The hope is now that Marte doesn't get complacent or content with where he's at and continues to do all he can to get better and turn into the player that he has the potential to turn into. It wasn't a problem with McCutchen, and from knowing what we know about Marte so far, I don't think it'll be a problem for him either.