The Nationals miraculously managed to come to terms with Steven Strasburg and mega-agent Scott Boras, the most accomplished negotiator this side of William Shatner, before last night's midnight deadline.
While the details of the deal have been released, as we all know, the numbers we see in the news do not encapture all the conditions of the agreement.
Take, for example, the ninety-some-odd million dollars on Eli Manning's recent contract. They represent the potential amount he can earn, but the majority of his compensation is incentives-based. What you see in print in most cases is not what the player actually gets.
Michael Vick was awarded the most lucrative contract in NFL history before an ill-advised business manuever landed him in a Virginia prison, and when he did not fulfill the incentives written into his contract, he didn't earn close to the amount shown on paper.
While MLB contracts typically represent the entire sum a player can expect to take home for the duration of the agreement, Stephen Strasburg's package contains more than meets the eye.
Strasburg's original list of demands, as interpreted by Scott Boras, consisted of nearly 100 million U.S. dollars. When the Nationals refused to comply with their requests, Strasburg and Boras did what all great movie hostage takers do when their ransom goes unpaid. They threatened and made further demands.
It just so happens that Strasburg is a loyal Soviet nationalist furious that his Mother Russia has been upstaged as the world's pariah state par-excellence by petty former U.S.S.R. parcels like Afghanistan. While the Nats could not raise enough money to satisfy his original cash demands, their key positioning in our nation's capital made the team an able but unlikely broker for goods of a more volatile nature... Soviet terrorists held over as enemies-of-state from the Cold War.
In accordance with Strasburg's second list of demands, which were relayed to him over the phone by Scott Boras through a voice distorter like the one in the Scream films, Nationals owner Mark Lerner immediately contacted the Pentagon to negotiate for the release of seven Soviet terrorists retained in the military prison at Guantanimo Bay, Cuba. Although Lerner had to give up season tickets to the Kennedy Center and was forced to fix the outcome of several of the Nats' now famous 6th inning President Runs, the Pentagon complied, satisfying the most stringent of Strasburg's demands.
Next, Lerner was forced to arrange a fuelled 747 to be prepped on the tarmac of the Havana airport to facilitate the transportation of the Soviet loyalists, along with a squadron of accompanying FA/18 Hornets to function as a protective envoy for the expatriates.
Once Lerner orchestrated the fireballing Strasburg's requests, he agreed to ink a nominal $15 million deal to help the Nats save face. Strasburg, content and optimistic that the terrorists will effectively be able to incite a second Cold War, reported to Rookie Ball in Des Moines this morning.
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