With baseball’s revenues growing at a blistering rate, it has become more and more difficult for analysts to accurately dissect big-money, multi-year signings. What we thought we knew just two years ago seems to be obsolete, with the market shifting upwards at breakneck speed.

Yes, we’ve seen this before. Culminating with the infamous winter of ’01, Major League payrolls rose between thirteen to nineteen percent annually for five consecutive years. Overall, teams spent almost four and a half times as much on player salaries in 2001 as they did in 1990.

With Armageddon warnings seemingly plastered on every team’s office walls, sensibility (or perhaps collusion) eventually resurfaced. Payrolls rose only moderately in 2002 and 2003, and actually declined a bit in 2004. The bubble had burst, leaving teams that had signed players to mega-deals in previous years shaking their heads, and/or calling Brian Cashman for a little relief. […]