With the San Diego Padres rumored to be shedding payroll, the assumption across baseball was that former ace would be too expensive to resign, that proved to be the case when marquee starter Dylan Cease signed a seven-year, $210 million deal with the Toronto Blue Jays.
But a new piece of information has emerged that definitely adds a twist to this story. According to an AP report via NBCSports com, Cease’s deal includes $64 million in deferred money, and Cease agreed to wait until 2046 to receive the final payment on his deal.
The specific terms are unusual, to say the least. Cease gets a $23 million signing bonus in January, then $22 million in 2026. After that he’ll receive $30 million in 2027, after which his annual salary drops slightly each year through 2032.
The deferred payments are extended from 2033-2046, with amounts ranging from $4.5-$10 million due annually over that period. Cease also reportedly has a limited no-trade clause that allows him to block deals to eight teams.
Those initial numbers are fairly reasonable for a pitcher with at least 200 strikeouts in each of the last five seasons. Knowing about the possibility of deferred money might have opened up the market for Cease to a lot more teams, and the money numbers also raise the possibility that Cease and his agent took this deal because they knew there weren’t a lot of lucrative offers coming.
Could the Padres have afforded something like this? Did they even know it was possible? We’re not going to get any answers about this given the cone of silence that has descended over Padres headquarters since the announcement of new manager Craig Stammen, but these are very valid questions to ask.
The deferred money possibility also raises questions about what the Padres rotation for 2026 might have looked like if they’d been able to sign Cease. They’d be operating from a position of strength with their starting rotation, instead of being a team that might wind up extending stud receivers Mason Miller and Adrian Morejon to bolster the rotation.
It would be interesting to hear what GM A.J. Preller has to say about all this, but that's probably not going to happen. Instead we’ll have to wait for next week’s winter GM meetings, when Preller will indirectly tell us how he feels based on whatever moves the Padres do or don’t make going as the team continues to slow crawl its way into the offseason.