Transaction Action: Se... (04/27)
the archives are now free.
83 comments have been left for this article. BP Comment Quick Links
| |
|
|
April 27, 2010 Ahead in the CountRyan Howard and the New MORP
Just days after my two-part series introduced the new MORP to evaluate baseball contracts, the Phillies provided me with an excellent opportunity to put it into action by signing Ryan Howard to a five-year contract extension yesterday. The deal extends Howard’s contract to cover 2012-16 for a guaranteed $125 million, while providing the Phillies with an option for 20107 that would make the deal worth $138 million in total. The Phillies will also miss out on two all-but-guaranteed picks in the first or second rounds of the 2012 amateur draft in the form of compensation if he had departed. I showed last week that the value of these picks would be roughly $23 million, which means that this is really a deal where the Phillies are choosing between Ryan Howard from 2012-16 at $148 million, or Ryan Howard from 2012-17 at $161 million. If you listened to the roar of the sabermetricians, you would think the Phillies had thrown nine figures at Juan Castro. You got to hear the same tired claims about Howard trotted out again. These include the "he’s a platoon player" argument, the "he can’t play defense" argument, and the "he’s slow" argument. You have probably already read analyses comparing Howard to Mo Vaughn and Cecil Fielder, and predicting his imminent demise. On the other hand, if you listened to the roar of the old-school writers, you would think the Phillies had stolen an MVP off the market at a discount. The same tired statistics like runs batted in would have rung through your ears, and assertions about dynasties secured would have undoubtedly hit your eyeballs during your surfing. The reality is that Howard falls somewhere between these two extremes. The contract is far from spectacular, but it is unlikely to be an albatross. The deal will ultimately come down to two primary factors, neither of which can be properly estimated by either group of commentators: the rate at which Howard ages, and the rate at which the price of a win inflates. Obviously, if Howard ages gracefully and produces well into his thirties, the Phillies are probably going to be getting a great bargain. Equally obviously, if he tanks, the Phillies are in trouble. If major-league salaries inflate the way that they did during the middle of the 2000s, Howard is going to have plenty of leeway to age without being useless; if salaries hold steady like they have over the last few years, Howard is not only going to need to maintain his production, but might need to learn to pitch, too, in order to be worth his salary. First, let’s talk about the price of a win with a brief refresher of the new MORP, and discuss the kind of production that the Phillies would need from Howard under a few different salary inflation scenarios. After that, I will make the case that this deal is probably a fair one after all, or at least it’s not the albatross that others are claiming. What Does He Need to Do to Make It Worthwhile? Last week’s MORP articles explained that the price of 1.0 WARP3 in 2010 is approximately $5 million. This is in contrast with FanGraphs’ claim of approximately $4 million per WAR. These numbers are even further apart when you considering the fact that 1.0 WAR is worth about 1.16 WARP3, meaning that FanGraphs’ numbers are suggesting that 1.0 WARP3 is worth only $3.5 million. The reason that this analysis is inaccurate is that FanGraphs neglected draft-pick compensation, which ignores about 11 percent of total compensation, and it also looked at only the first year of contracts. Since a number of contracts went out to players unlikely to age well this past offseason, average annual value (or AAV) is a particularly poor way to evaluate these deals. As a result, FanGraphs appears to believe that the price of a win went down over 10 percent during an economic recovery from the worst recession in decades. The new version of MORP provides a more accurate estimate of the cost of a win, which is approximately $5 million for 2010. However, Howard’s deal does not begin until 2012, and extends as far as 2017 if the Phillies pick up the option. I have made a conservative estimate that salaries will inflate at five percent on average for the sake of picking a number, but salaries could really do any number of things. Reports have suggested the salaries inflated at about 8-10 percent during the mid-2000s, while inflation for 2008-10 appears to be about one percent. The reality is that we do not know how much inflation will be. If it’s two percent, the Phillies are in trouble, but if it’s 10 percent, they are in decent shape. One of the best aspects of this contract is that the option actually takes advantage of this uncertainty. Howard could be anywhere from replacement level in 2017 to a perennial four-win bomber. How so? If salaries inflate 10 percent and Howard turns into the four-win bomber (a perfect scenario), he will be worth $39 million in 2017 but will only get paid $13 million. On the other hand, if salaries inflate by two percent and Howard turns into a zero-win player (a disaster scenario), Howard will be worth zero. If Howard is equally likely to be worth anywhere from $0-$39 million, but the Phillies only have to pay him $13 million if he is worth $13 million, then effectively they have a one-third probability of not picking up the option, and a two-thirds probability of picking up an option worth somewhere between $13-$39 million for the price of $13 million. On average, this is worth a net $13 million if it is picked up, which will only happen two-thirds of the time, meaning that the value of the option is about $9 million. The cost of the option (the guaranteed portion/buyout) is $10 million; effectively, the option is worth what it costs, meaning that we really only need to analyze the five-year, $115-million dollar deal. Let’s consider the WARP3 that Howard would need to produce to be worth his contract if there is two, five, or 10 percent salary inflation. Let's start with the scenario where salaries only inflate at two percent, so that the price of a win would change like so: 2012: $5.2 million Howard will get paid $20 million in 2012 and 2013, and $25 million in 2014, 2015, and 2016. Also, if we spread the $23 million opportunity cost of foregoing draft-pick compensation across the five guaranteed years, we can think of this as $24.6 million for 2012 and 2013, and $29.6 million for 2014, 2015, and 2016. Thus, Howard would need to produce as follows to be exactly worth his contract each year: 2012: 4.7 WARP3 Considering Howard will be 36 in 2016 and produced 5.1, 3.7, and 4.8 WARP3 from 2007-09, it appears that he would need to actually improve to be worth his contract if salaries inflate at only two percent annually. Now, let's suppose that salaries inflate at five percent. In that case, the price of a win would go to about: 2012: $5.5 million In that case, Howard would need to produce at the following clip to be worth his deal in each year: 2012: 4.5 WARP3 This still seems to assume that Howard will not experience any negative effects of aging, the deal appear to be unspectacular, though not quite disastrous if salaries inflate at a five percent clip. If salaries inflate at 10 percent, the following prices would be: 2012: $6.1 million The win values would need to be: 2012: 4.1 WARP3 All of a sudden, this starts to look like it could very well be a decent deal. Ultimately, the question is whether Howard is likely to age gracefully or not, because if he becomes a below-average player by the end of the contract or becomes merely average in the middle of the deal, even a high inflation level won’t cut it. This contract actually starts to look terrific when you consider the possibility that the next collective bargaining agreement (after the current one ends after 2011) could remove draft-pick compensation. If that does happen, and salaries rise as I predicted in my MORP series, then even the five percent salary inflation looks quite plausible for Howard to achieve, and if the outcome of the next CBA does not allow for draft-pick compensation, this could easily turn into a good deal: 2012: 3.6 wins Will the Real Ryan Howard Please Stand Up? The $100-million question that needs to be answered is how well Howard will age. There are a slew of comparables that we can discuss, and I will elaborate on those players in a minute, but the most important clue about Howard’s aging process is the fact that the Phillies chose to re-sign him. Is that because the Phillies are geniuses? No; the real reason is that the Phillies know more about Howard’s body, habits, and character than any of the analysts attempting to evaluate the deal from afar. That’s not unique to the Phillies; that’s something that holds true for all teams who re-sign their players. To go back to last month, I published the following table of how much of a player’s total WARP3 are produced in each year of multi-year contracts. You will notice something very different between players who re-signed with their teams and players who signed with new teams:
Players who re-sign with their teams seem to hold up very well overall, even improving over two-year contracts while barely losing value in three-year and even four-year deals. On the other hand, players who sign two-year and three-year contracts with new teams usually decline drastically. The reason is selection bias. If you know a player’s body, habits, and character, you can get a better sense of how well he might age. To bring this back to the specifics with Howard, the media reports that appear every spring training are often too clichéd to be taken seriously, but the fact is that Howard has lost noticeable amounts of weight during each of the last two offseasons. He’s gone from a defensive liability to average in both categories as he has gotten lighter. Consider his defensive numbers according to Mitchel Lichtman’s UZR and Baseball Info Solutions’ Defensive Runs Saved (DRS):
As far as specifics, Howard may have a terrible arm, but his fielding skills are pretty average and are even improving a little bit. If you watch him in the field, the numbers are confirmed by observation as well. He struggled terribly with ground balls on his glove side early in his career, but he has worked hard and now makes these plays rather well. To move to one of the other criticisms of Howard, many have claimed that Howard is slow, but he is only a mildly below-average runner. In fact, since his worst season in 2007, he has even improved a little on the base paths, stealing eight bases in nine tries in 2009. Look at Howard’s Equivalent Baserunning Runs (EqBRR) over the course of his career: 2006: -3.2 Ultimately, the claims that Howard’s defense and baserunning make him a liability are not true. Though these skills may both decline over time, the Phillies are in a better position to evaluate this than the average analyst. Defense and baserunning often decline because of a player's physical condition, and the Phillies know Howard's body better than anyone. Ultimately, it’s hard to believe the Phillies would have signed Howard to this contract so far in advance of free agency if he had physical problems. There is also another common, ill-founded criticism of Howard, one which I have called the 'Ryan Howard Can’t Hit Lefties Myth', which I also followed up on in last year’s Baseball Prospectus Idol competition. There are two reasons that people think this is true. One is that they do not know how poorly platoon splits hold up over time: the sample size is rarely large enough, so even an extreme platoon split can be expected to be scaled down the following year. The other reason this myth persists is because people only focus on the difference between Howard’s performances versus right-handed pitching and left-handed pitching, than the actual performance against lefties. While his 2009 troubles against left-handers was very notable, his career OPS against them is 752; the league average left-handed hitter had a 703 OPS against left-handers last year. Howard’s career OPS against same-handed pitching is roughly average for a first baseman. In contrast, his anomalous 1063 OPS against right-handers is so devastating that they intentionally walk him as often in a season as some hitters draw walks overall. Of course, all of this was just to show that Howard is roughly a 4.5-win player at this stage in his career. The real question is how well he will age. To see the difference between the critics of this deal and its proponents, you only need to look at Ryan Howard’s list of comparables, which includes Willie Stargell, Willie McCovey, and Jim Thome, all whom aged very well and put up elite seasons well into their 30s. The list also includes players who fell off a cliff, like Mike Epstein and Cecil Fielder. The question is which of these groups of players is Howard most like. Last year, I looked at Howard’s list of comparables according to both PECOTA and Baseball-Reference.com and I noticed an interesting difference between each set. I will reproduce this chart from last year below:
What you should notice is that, for the most part, the players who aged better were the ones who hit more home runs to the opposite field. On the other hand, pull-happy hitters like Fielder and Jose Canseco (who was on last year’s list of Howard comparables) fell apart more quickly. Howard’s batted-ball profile actually looks a lot like Thome’s. That is a good sign, as Thome continued to rack up four- and five-win seasons through most of his mid-30s. If this is what happens to Howard, the deal will look like a major success. It is tough to tell exactly what will happen to Howard, but if he ages like the Phillies think he will, this deal will be a fair one, if not even a little bit of a bargain in the event of major salary inflation. So It Might be Worthwhile... But Is It Werth-While? The fear among Phillies fans is that this deal might have eliminated the possibility of re-signing right fielder Jayson Werth, whose contract expires at the end of this season, which would allow him to become a free agent. This is a false tradeoff, which is the result of assumptions about constant budgets that are not related to winning. The belief that fans have is that the Phillies won’t be able to afford Werth. The myth here is that teams spend money to be nice to their fans, but only up until they reach some arbitrary budget, and then they stop. This is untrue: teams spend money to make money. What the Phillies probably cannot afford is to spend $150 million a season on a .500 team that never nets them playoff revenue. The Phillies have essentially committed to spending enough money to be competitive during the time period that Howard is under contract. The Phillies have a lot of contracts expiring after 2011 and may soon become underdogs to strong young Braves squads. However, if the contracts of Howard, Jimmy Rollins, Brad Lidge, Ryan Madson, and Raul Ibanez had all expired after 2011, and Cole Hamels was a year away from free agency, the Phillies could have chosen to fold and spend less money. What they have done by signing Howard is commit to having a lot of money already spent during those years, unless they trade players. They have also recently extended the contracts of Shane Victorino and Joe Blanton through 2012, further indicating their commitment to spend a lot of money during these years. The reality is that if the Phillies think they are going to have to choose between being a $140-million team that is average in 2012 or a $160-million contending team in 2012, they are going to find the latter more profitable. This impacts Werth’s signability less than you might think, even considering their payroll trend of the past few years, which has gone from $98 million in 2008 to $113 million 2009 to $138 million in 2010. Werth is a player who is worth about four wins per year as well, and will also probably be a Type-A free agent. Thus, he would likely get a contract comparable to the four years and $66 million Jason Bay signed with the Mets over the winter, maybe a bit more with salary inflation. Assuming that this is around five percent or so, this will probably check in around $20 million, as will Rollins if they choose to re-sign him after 2011. The Phillies have already committed $134.7 million for 2011, and that will be bumped to around $137 million after Ben Francisco and Greg Dobbs are paid and maybe $140 million after re-filling some bench and bullpen jobs. They are already spending $138.2 million this year, so giving Werth about $15 million in the first year of his contract (assuming it is slightly back-loaded) would put them at about a 10-percent increase in payroll between 2010 and 2011. Of course, re-signing Werth would probably entail trading Ibanez and eating some of his contract, as left-handed hitting prospect Domonic Brown will probably be given one corner outfield position in 2011. It only makes sense that Brown would replace the left-handed hitting Ibanez. Eating half of Ibanez’s salary would put the Phillies under $150 million, a perfectly reasonable and possible number for a team that has been spending more and more in recent years. Even if Ibanez struggles greatly in 2010, there is probably a market for him at $6 million, which is half his 2011 salary. They currently have $86.9 million committed in 2012, but after arbitration adjustments for Hamels, Francisco, and J.A. Happ, and filling a few bullpen and bench roles that are not yet filled, that will be closer to $115 million. Rollins and Werth at around $20 million each fits in perfectly. This process would entail salaries inflating from about $138 million 2010 to $148 million in 2011 to $155 million in 2012. Things are hazier after 2012, as much depends on whether the Phillies re-sign Cole Hamels, but the Phillies seem pretty committed to locking down their own stars, so that could happen as well. Conclusion This is not the apocalypse. The salaries look gaudy, but it’s quite reasonable to expect that the best players in the league are making $40 million by the time this contract is over. Alex Rodriguez isn’t going to be the best player in baseball when he’s earning $28 million in 2013 either. The market will probably move past these numbers. Every time a large contract for an elite player is signed, analysts make the mistake of comparing the player to the players who currently make that salary level. Adjusting for inflation makes this far less scary. This deal actually makes a lot of sense when you consider the fact that the Phillies probably have a lot of inside information about Howard’s likely aging pattern. Teams have shown that they do a very good job of re-signing only the players who will age gracefully. If Howard can at least be an above average player for the majority of this contract and salaries inflate like they have in other expansions, this deal will probably come out looking fair. I still think it’s probably a little on the high end, given the opportunity cost of two draft picks that they could have received in 2012, but this is hardly a contract that is sure to debilitate the franchise for years to come. For Phillies phans, this is actually a great sign. The Phillies have committed a lot of money already to the middle of this decade, which is now a sunk cost. The Phillies are that much closer to remaining competitive during those years, and are far more likely to spend the money they need to spend to keep up with the rising Braves in the NL East. This deal could end up making phans happier, even if it was more than the Phillies would have needed to spend for his production. Teams know about their own players. Both the Jimmy Rollins five-year deal during 2005, and the Chase Utley seven-year deal after 2006 were called into serious question by analysts. The fact is that the Phillies know their guys very well. If the Phillies think Howard is healthy and in good enough shape to age well, I am inclined to take that judgment into account.
Matt Swartz is an author of Baseball Prospectus.
|
PECOTA says no.
Okay Matt, nice try. Really. Maybe with super high inflation things work out just fine. Maybe he can hit lefties, maybe the fact that he has like +200 OPS with runners on and way more such opportunities than comparable hitters will not change when utley and jrol slow down, maybe other hitters wouldn't get boosted nearly as much by hitting in citizens bank (i know, he hits just as many homers on the road).
For those who are interested Baseball Prospectus' proprietary projection system has this to say about Howard-2012-16
2.7
2.6
2.1
1.7
1.6
Maybe if it reweighed him at 235 it'd see that beautiful man coming out?
I don't need to multiply those numbers by your dollar figures. Let's put it this way, he's going to make almost as much as Joe mauer got for similar years in a similarly timed deal. Yes he's less injured than joe mauer, but Mauer is a better baseball player, lets not mince words.
The Twins got a discount for their risk taking. You can't argue that the phils did. No way another team would have given him this deal, and that is the definition of consumer deficit.
Good luck!
PECOTA is a reference point. Never ever take PECOTA as the end of the story.
If you look at the aging tables above, you will see that re-signed players do not age as PECOTA predicts, while players who sign contracts with new teams do exhibit this pattern. Additionally, I discussed the comparables that formed that projection, explaining why Howard's non-PECOTA characteristics have more in common with his more gracefully aging comparables.
The fact that Howard hits better with runners on is something that is common among the majority of players who defenses shift against: http://www.thegoodphight.com/2009/1/29/741980/there-is-clutch-or-the-cas I wrote that article last year detailing this process.
Howard hits more HR on the road, for one thing, and the stadium isn't going anywhere before 2017 anyway so he still gets to reap its benefits anyway.
Joe Mauer was probably a great deal, though it really depends on his health. Still, it will probably look better than Howard's contract. Alex Rodriguez's will probably look worse if you check his PECOTA, but I'm guessing he will age more gracefully than that as well. Put it this way: Mauer was a bargain, but that wasn't the opportunity cost of signing Howard. Mauer was off the market. Other deals for this period of time are not yet signed.
I don't think the contract is a great one, and I did say in the article it was a little high. I would have come in closer to $110MM or so. Still, just talking about PECOTA when I already looked at the PECOTA and decided where it was off is going backwards. Say why you think Howard will age like Cecil Fielder rather than Jim Thome. That would be a more compelling case.
I do have one question, Does your morp model make the phillies pay for say, not offering howard arbitration rather than picking up his old 2011 option (if i remember how the contract went)? Or say rollins' for that matter.
Also, I wasn't trying to dispute that there are reasons for howard hitting better with runners on, but that just contributes to the context dependency of his value, and one that might change if utley, rollins and co aren't as good as they have been in the last 3 years(they very well might not be).
Yes, the opportunity cost of letting Howard go in 2011 is one of my main arguments as to why I think the value was higher than I'd have paid. If the next CBA eliminates this compensation before the 2012 draft, I think that the deal would look much better and probably wouldn't be over market value at all.
Utley is around until 2013, and the Phillies will probably extend him after that. I think it's fairly reasonable that Howard will be able to assume the Phillies will put up some OBP in the 3-hole.
One thing I have in mind is the replacement value. What can the Phillies get with that 25 million after Howard departs? A younger A-Gon who is able to hit 35 HR while calling Petco Park home? That's why this is a bad deal. It will be a buyer market when Howard is a FA. No way he is worth 25... this is not a bargain at all. The Phils gave up all the leverage in possible negotiation of a reasonable deal.
Firstly, Adrian Gonzalez is only 2.5 years younger than Howard. Secondly, I'd bet he gets more than $25MM/year. He would get $25MM/year if he went on the market right now, but I'm guessing he breaks $30MM/year.
Both teams gave up leverage. The myth that future price uncertainty isn't already included in current prices continues.
It seems that the pure dollar figure isn't what people are up in arms about, but the timing of the extension, and the number of years involved. They are ot waiting for the market to develop, and not waiting for howard's 2 extra years of evaluation time to yield data to minimize the eval risk. These seem like major gambling decisions on future market condition and the strength of the team's scouting and baseball knowledge.
As I've said elsewhere, one of the most important factors here is market scarcity. An analysis of what the phillies could expect to get on the FA market etc can help put the howard deal in context.
Also, Howard is clearly not being evaluated by advanced stats, and given what we know about the phillies, it's reasonable to assume that the phillies were paying for stats that are overvalued. This is simply a "sabr" judgment, because the stats phils use to value howard are bad, they suffered some loss on that front. If they could get the same production from the market, but represented in less flashy stats, I'd say they would most likely get a much better deal.
Market scarcity is already priced into MORP. That's the whole point of market values is that they reflect scarcity. MORP says the current cost of a win on the free agency market is $5MM including the opportunity cost of draft pick compensation. It could stagnate making this deal a disaster or it could inflate making it decent, but the concept of scarcity is not a new concept that needs to be introduce. It's the basis of market values.
The Phillies don't use advanced stats to evaluate players as near as I can tell. They seem to be vaguely aware of them, but they are not using them in their analysis. Somehow, the groupthink on this has led to the conclusion that "if the Phillies don't use new school stats, they must focus on old school stats." That's ridiculous. The Phillies are a team heavily invested in scouting and health, which is the only reason that they've kept their heads above water while much of the league does better data analysis. I do not see any evidence this was based on RBI. I see evidence that the Phillies were focused on his workout routine and improved defense, and determined that he was unlikely to age poorly. If he maintains his value throughout this contract, it's a good deal. The question is about how much he declines, not about the stats which will decline.
Also, there is a HUGE phallacy in the "wait for the market to develop" argument which I cannot believe has gotten this far. The market could go in EITHER direction. If the market gets better, Howard requires more money to re-sign; if the market gets worse, he requires less. This is about taking on a risk, which is generally smart to do in baseball given the shape of the marginal revenue curve.
Put it this way-- if "waiting for the market to develop" was always a good idea for teams to do, it would always be a bad idea for players to do. Scott Boras would be in the poor house. His off-season strategy is tied up with hoping the market gets more expensive over the course of the off-season.
yes, price is scarcity, but i mean by scarcity something more specific here, something on the order of "how much talent is in upcoming fa classes" the baseball fa market is pretty limited, so i'd think there are large discrepancies across fa classes in terms of talent supply. because teams have different outlooks on their window of contention and so forth, the scarcity in particular fa classes and scarcity longterm affect teams differently. if it is the case that the upcoming fa class in the howard contract year is particularly sparse, then even though the longterm morp would not be affected all that much by the seasonal scarcity, a team with a pressing time window of contention would find that their own morp for that particular year is higher than usual. the inability to make decisions in the long term would mean the inability to follow the lower morp curve.
as for waiting for the market to develop, i don't think you should assume that the phillies are forced to sign him no matter what and thus eat all of the risk for high inflation. it is my assumption that howard is a pretty inefficient way of getting your wins for your money, so even if the general price of a win is hugely inflated in the future, you can still find some reasonable replacements at reasonable cost.
the point about scouting and athleticism is well taken. although attributing win value to on field performance is still an issue for the phillies. if they over value the rbi man in an rbi sequence, i do think that's directly attributable to bad stats. how they value rbis do matter, but yea it's not proper to assume that they value it in a dumb way. maybe they don't pay attention to stats at all and simply evaluate ability or something.
The "how much talent is in the FA class" argument is somewhat misguided as well. What is lost in that analysis is that players on the FA market are removed from their old teams. Yes, that year's FA class will potentially also include Albert Pujols, Prince Fielder, and Adrian Gonzalez, but the Cardinals, Brewers, and Padres (or whoever Gonzalez is playing for at the time) will now all be without a first baseman in these scenarios.
I'm not saying that the Phillies are forced to sign him. I'm saying that the Phillies have the altnerative of paying approximately the same price for wins as everyone else will at that time, so if they plan on being competitive, Howard may represent as good an option as any at the time. Under higher salary inflation, it could turn out to be an efficient way for the Phillies to get their wins. Anything near ten percent inflation with a modest rate of decline for Howard will make the cost of Howard's wins added lower than the alternatives on the market.
well, i'm not posing the fa class issue as an argument against howard's deal. i am only saying that it's an empirical condition that gives context to howard's deal, a context sensitive to particular team needs and the absolute amount of talent on the short term market. these are things that i think morp's scalar estimation of win value can't capture very well.
I agree that the market will depend on scarcity. The market always depends on scarcity. The reason that I unraveled a series of possible inflation alternatives is precisely because I agree with you that the market conditions are not set in stone and a number of possibilities should be considered.
my concern with the scarcity bit is that a bad fa class costs teams in win-now mode far more than it does teams in rebuilding mode, or teams that don't have a particularly pressing need for fa talent immediately and can choose when to sign a player they want.
Heh heh. He said phallacy.
You made some decent points, but probably could have done without the sarcasm.
PECOTA isn't an exact prediction system anyway, it projects the possibility that a player might perform to a certain level, if all things are equal. All things are not equal and projections change every year. You won't find an established player in PECOTA with a "Good" 5th-year projection compared to his current production because there is just a ton of uncertainty built in. PECOTA certainly isn't predicting that Howard WILL be a 1.6 win player in 2016, it's just saying he COULD be.
Matt, I found this to be the ONLY useful analysis on this trade on the internet today. Thanks for all the effort you must have put into writing it, and getting it to us when it is still timely.
Maybe if I had said "contract" or "development" or "extension" instead of "trade", that last sentence would have made some shred of sense.