Red Sox's bizarre Roman Anthony contract incentives draw media scrutiny

College football's playoff system is still in its relative infancy, but few would argue that a 12-team bracket format is worse than our previous attempts to determine a national champion.

The BCS was a mess, a square peg of meritocracy stuck in a round hole of bowl games that were never designed to crown a champion. The AP Top 25 was (and is) a composite opinion poll of an ever-diminishing press corps covering the sport, hardly a way to pick a winner — let alone rank the best teams.

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Boston Red Sox outfielder Roman Anthony never played baseball in college, let alone football. What does any of this have to do with the nouveau riche 21-year-old?

Anthony agreed to a $130 million contract extension with the Boston Red Sox this week. The contract, which kicks in next year, keeps him in Boston for the next eight years at a minimum of $130 million. The Red Sox will have the option of extending his contract by a year, at $30 million for the 2034 season.

Widely considered a bargain for the team, one particular bonus clause in Anthony's contract stands out: if he wins the Rookie of the Year Award in 2025, he'll get a suite on the road in 2031. If not, he'll have to wait a year for the suite incentive to kick in.

The clause is effectively an endorsement of the glorified opinion poll that is the Rookie of the Year vote, one that comes with a very tangible cost to the Red Sox (and benefit to Anthony).

It gets more bizarre.

Chris Cotillo of MassLive.com reported that Anthony can earn another $100 million if he wins every MVP award from now through 2033, is an All-Star each year, and finishes first or second in 2025 Rookie of the Year voting.

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Using the BBWAA awards to decide any element of Anthony's contract — let alone one that doesn't kick in for another six years, or pays him an extra $100 million — is bad. It's not as overtly bad as the previous iterations of crowning a college football champion, but spiritually it's on the same wavelength.

As Andy Martino of SNY pointed out, it's simply not how God intended postseason awards voting to be weaponized.

"We reporters should not have direct voting control over a player's salary," Martino wrote Wednesday on Twitter/X.

Of all the reasons why this is true, there's this: wagering on postseason awards voting is already rife for potential corruption. The possibiliity of gambler activity influencing voting, or vice versa, prompted the BBWAA to adopt a series of bylaws to prevent the co-mingling of postseason voting and wagering last summer.

Major League Baseball — or in this case an individual MLB team, not the corporate entity headquartered in Manhattan — is more comfortable making gross financial incentives available on the whim of one group of opinion-makers. Giving Roman Anthony $100 million and a year's worth of hotel suites if he wins a certain set of polls isn't the same as industry actors wagering on the sport. It is, however, all one big step away from the purity of a process never meant to influence financial outcomes.

That sucks. Unfortunately this isn't the first time a writer or two have had to point it out. It won't be the last.

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