Yesterday, Dave wrote an article about Jason Heyward’s next contract, and concluded with the idea that his next contract would almost definitely start with a two, and might even touch into the threes. When I suggested this to some of my friends they claimed that Heyward was not worth that price and completely disregarded the argument. This got me to thinking about what it would look like if we follow the projections.

After some great help from Neil and Jeff to get help with projections, I decided to try to tackle the question on my own. I started looking at Heyward’s WAR starting in 2016 (the first year of his next contract) and project that moving forward.

To start, I’m going to assume the value of a win next off-season will be roughly $6.3m ($6m this year with a 5 percent increase). Every year after that will go up by 5 percent through the end of the contract. Perhaps this isn’t the best way to go about this, but it is an idea that I have seen suggested several times.

After that, I went into the projections. Steamer projects Heyward to produce 4.4 wins next season, and (following the advice of Jeff and Neil), I assumed he would produce 4.4 wins every season from age-26 to 30 seasons, at which point I started taking a half-win off each following season until the tenth (and final) year of the proposed contract. In the end, Heyward projects to provide about 36.5 wins from 2016 to 2025.

Now that we have set up the parameters, we can get into the actual money of the deal. To find the value of each season I multiplied the WAR for an individual season by the dollars/WAR value for each season. Heyward’s value by season projects to go: $27.7m, $29.1m, $30.6m, $32.1m, $33.7m, $31.4m, $28.7m, $25.7m, $22.3m and $18.6m, for a total of $279.8 million over the ten seasons.

I know a lot of people are not quite as high on Heyward as I (and Steamer, apparently) am, so I also ran the numbers if Heyward produces 4 wins from 26-30, then a half-win less for each season after that. If that were to happen, Heyward would produce about 32.5 wins that would be valued at roughly $248 million.

Without assuming any breakout seasons, and even including the possibility that Heyward regresses a little before plateauing, he still projects to be worth over $225 million, and potentially in the neighborhood of $275 million without a breakout season in 2015. Heyward looks like he might be the guy that makes people realize that $200 million in today’s game isn’t what it used to be.

With the Cardinals season recently finished, and the end of season press conferences over, one thing was made clear for the 2015 season in St. Louis: center field was Jon Jay’s to lose. I have a few problems with this. First of all, I hate guaranteed starting jobs. I’m not saying it will happen, but it is very easy for players to fall into more of a relaxed state when they know they don’t have to fight for their playing time. As we saw in 2013, when Jay had no competition for the job, he’s not immune to becoming too relaxed in his play. Second, I still am not convinced that Jon Jay is the best center fielder on our team.

Let me make one thing clear: this is not an anti-Jay piece. I really enjoy having Jay on the team, and I think he’s a very solid piece to the team. I would love for the Cardinals to retain Jay, I’m just not sure I want him to be our starting center fielder.

Jay has generally been pretty consistent in his play throughout his career. He has 5 seasons with over 300 plate appearances since 2010, and he wRC+ over that span have all been between 115 and 116 with the exception of 2013 – a season which seems to be pretty unlucky as his BABIP dropped 30 points despite his batted ball profile remaining mostly the same. At this point in his career, it seems like we know (mostly) what type of player Jay is – an above-average hitter, with limited power, and basically average skills everywhere else.

While there is value in being average to above average everywhere, the Cardinals have another center fielder that seems to be mostly average at the plate, but has elite skills when it comes to base-running and fielding. Peter Bourjos, for his career, has posted a wRC+ of 94 – just six percent shy of being a league average hitter. While you could argue that it’s mostly driven from 2011, you could also argue that was also the only season in which he’s received consistent playing time for a full season. On top of that, Bourjos was a league-average hitter or better at every stop in the minors on his way to the big leagues – so it’s not impossible to say that he could be a league-average hitter in the majors. Add into that Bourjos’s great speed (he’s been roughly five runs above average on a 600 PA rate throughout his career) and his elite defense, and Bourjos starts to look like a great candidate.

This year, Jay got nearly twice as many plate appearances as Bourjos, and produced roughly twice as many wins as Bourjos – which makes sense. When grading them on equal scales (WAR/600), the two center fielders produced identical 3.2 win values – which brings me to the next point for starting Bourjos.

The Cardinals have long been looking to improve their offense on their bench. For years the Cardinals have had one of the weaker benches of postseason contenders, and every year they look to improve upon that. With Jay providing a clearly better bat (his career wRC+ is nearly 20 percent better than Bourjos), it seems like a good (cheap) way to improve the bench without hurting the starters. Bourjos provides similar (if not better) value to the everyday line-up, while Jay gives the Cardinals a solid bat to come off the bench.

While it’s unlikely we see this happen, barring Jay returning to his 2013 play, it seems like a reasonable route to efficiently take care of a problem so that the front office and focus on other areas of concern (the bullpen, other bench bats, back-up catcher). Mozeliak has an opportunity to make a quick, relatively cheap fix to an area of concern for his team – I just hope he and Matheny will let that happen.