By Larry LaRue
The News Tribune
From a free agent’s perspective, Bret Boone picked a bad year to have his best season – and on Wednesday accepted a three-year plus an option contract with the Seattle Mariners that was first offered more than a month ago.
“Is it what I wanted? Not really. Is it where I wanted to play? Yes,” Boone said from his Florida home.
“All this crap is over with, and now I just want to get ready to play baseball. For three or four more years I won’t have to worry about this.”
The best season of his career helped Boone finish third in the American League Most Valuable Player voting, and his final totals – a .331 average with 37 home runs and a league-leading 141 RBI – were among the best ever by a second baseman.
Still, this winter the offers didn’t come for a man who won’t turn 33 until April.
“This was a peculiar market, and the longer our offer was out there the better it looked,” M’s general manager Pat Gillick said. We didn’t change it much at all. We hoped it would be good enough, but we didn’t know until the last few days.”
By signing Boone to a three-year contract, with a fourth-year option bringing the whole package to about $30 million, Gillick has now locked in five regular position players beyond the 2002 season.
“We’ve got shortstop, second base and third base locked in for awhile, and we’ve got center field and right field locked in,” Gillick said. “That’s five spots locked up for the future.”
For a team coming off back-to-back AL Championship Series appearances, that’s an advantage.
“I think our team will be similar to the one we had last year,” Boone said. “No one can play third base any better than David Bell did last year, but I’ve watched Jeff Cirillo play for years – he’s a great hitter and a very good defensive player.
“We lost Jose Paniagua but got Shigetoshi Hasegawa. We brought in Ruben Sierra to play left field, and we’re going to give a couple of the kids like Joel Pineiro and Ryan Franklin the chance to step up.
“We’ll make a run at our division and hopefully get a better outcome in the post-season.”
Until he agreed to the multi-year contract, Boone had agreed to binding one-year salary arbitration with the Mariners – a situation that neither he nor the team much cared for.
“I was tired of working on one-year deals and renting a home,” Boone said. “Now I can buy one and stay put.”
From the Mariners perspective, the team realized it might have had to pay Boone more next season had they lost in arbitration that they’ll pay him now.
“We probably would have had to offer a little more next year in arbitration, and he might have asked for a lot more and won,” Gillick said.
“Right now, we’re about where we budgeted the payroll.”
Boone had trouble hiding the disappointment that a soft market produced, especially in light of a breakthrough year.
“The year we had, the year I had, was amazing,” Boone said. “The market surprised me. It surprised a lot of guys. Financially, it’s not as lucrative as a year ago – a lot of us were surprised.”
Though he hit nearly 80 points above his career average last year, raising that number from .255 to .265 in one season, neither Boone nor the Mariners expect a huge change in 2002.
“I don’t know if you can say I’ll drive in this many runs, hit this many home runs,” Boone said. “Last year was big year for me, and not just the numbers.
“I learned a lot. Something clicked last year, like ‘Oh, that’s it.’ It clicks early for some guys. It’s my job to prove I can keep this pace up for three or four years.”
Gillick said expecting Boone to duplicate his offensive numbers was as unrealistic as figuring on another 116-win season.
“We’ll have a better lineup, for one thing, with more guys driving in runs,” Gillick said. “I’d be happy with 100 RBI from Boone instead of 141, but he’ll be right in the heart of things for the next three or four years.”
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