Viva El Birdos: Holliday Deal Means Cardinals Are Officially A Big Market Team

SB Nation’s Viva El Birdos reacts to the Cardinals signing Matt Holliday to a seven-year, $120 million deal by acknowledging that this now means St. Louis is locked into being a big budget team:

It is more or less self-evident, but the Cardinals are now committed to running expensive teams out there indefinitely—while three players are combining to make more than $45 million, as will be the case in 2010 and 2011, there’s simply no reasonable case to be made for “cheaping out”, even in the pretty expensive, basically meaningless open-the-DeWallet sense of the word. A team that’s paying that same $45 million to two players once Pujols’s existing contract expires is not being run on a mid-market budget.

The ultimate conclusion is that they like the deal, especially compared to similar deals given to other outfielders in recent history — Vernon Wells and Alfonso Soriano.