Throughout the 1990’s, teams often gave players long-term contracts in order to out-bid the other guy.  They would insure the deal, against any injuries.  Around the year 2002, perhaps in 2003, insurers started only insuring 3 years of a contract.  Longer contracts were too large a risk, and the whole idea of figuring out how a player got injured made the whole thing untenable.  That’s when you saw teams really start to refrain from giving out contracts longer than three years.  This is one of the reasons why it was so surprising when the Mets gave Pedro Martinez that fourth year.  No one was going to do that, because that fourth year couldn’t be insured.

Well, it seems the Boston Red Sox are against any kind of insurance. According to this piece by Rob Bradford, Red Sox ownership has found that its just too hard to get paid back for injuries to players.  Its one of the big reasons why the Red Sox don’t go for contracts longer than 3 years, except in very special cases.  In the case of Jason Bay, even they were willing to sign him with suspected injuries and all, but they wanted him to pay half the cost of the insurance premium.  Bradford’s post sheds some interesting light on something that doesn’t get spoken about very often in print, but certainly affects just how contracts are meted out.  The Sox have become one of the most savvy teams around, and this is just one more example.