Well, the Reds have locked up Joey Votto for 10 years with another $200+ million dollar deal. These deals are totally insane. The odds of any player, whether it be Joey Votto, Prince Fielder or even Albert Pujols sustaining success over the course of a decade through their mid to late 30's are incredibly low. In the last 20 years, the examples that we have for players who performed at a high level in their late 30's are Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens along with a slew of others who may or may have not had pharmaceutical help that is no longer available. Most players peak between ages 25 and 31, while under team control and in reality reach free agency with probably 3 or 4 elite years left. Blue Jays fans have seen the burden that can be placed on a team when their highest paid player does not perform (see Vernon Wells) and to risk paying a player more then $20,000,000 a year for as many as 5 unproductive seasons in my opinion is a very poor risk. For every Reggie Jackson who is productive for decades there are many Mickey Mantle's whos production takes a nose dive after age 33 and it is pretty much guaranteed that at least 1 of the 3 men signed to 200$+ deals in the past 4 months will grossly under perform for a large chuck of their 10 year deals basically crippling that team for years. With the new CBA, teams can no longer count on the Yankees and Angels to eat these huge contracts if they start to go bust and these teams are basically putting all their eggs with one basket tying up so much money in one aging player which can have disastrous consequences on a teams payroll and abilty to compete (see Vernon Wells, Ryan Howard, Kevin Brown, Chase Utley, Johan Santana, Alfonso Soriano, Barry Zito, Carlos Lee, etc).