This was the item that somehow I wasn't factoring in. The money's freed up to be redeployed some other way. Maybe not quite as favorably as retaining a player good enough to WANT to opt out. But it mitigates the loss, in the upside case. I'm still pretty meh about acquiring Shields for Nolasco, because his 2015 represents new information that wasn't available when his contract was signed a year earlier. The odds of the contract turning out to approach its worst case can't be the same as back then, yet the cost that factors in those risks hasn't changed. I just want the pain to end, not be extended by a year and to a higher degree, so that colors my approach to computing an expectation value or whatever. My thinking also might be different if I believed the team would be willing to eat the last two years of an untradable $21M/yr contract, were the gamble to fail and that was the way such a trade played out. The fact they haven't already jettisoned Nolasco speaks to that. But it's not April yet and maybe a poor spring really will mean cutting ties with Ricky. Which would mean they didn't make this highly hypothetical trade for Shields, but now this is getting pretty darn circular.