Couple of things. A-Rod signed a 10 year, $252 million dollar deal in 2000. I beleive that was the highest deal until 2007, when he got 10-275. That is only a 9% increase and it took seven years. In the last year or two, I think Miguel Cabrera and Kershaw's deal are the only larger deals on a per year basis, at $29.2M a year (Miggy) and $30.7M (Kershaw). Kershaw's deal is only 11.6% more than A-Rod's and it took seven years to go up by that amount. So a 33% increase in just four years (when Trout would have been a free agent) seems unlikely. The other key is, when Trout was on a year by year basis, he carried all the injury risk. If he had concussions, major knee injuries, etc. it would be him that was out the money. Now that he has $144M guaranteed, all of that risk transferred to the Angels. A price should be put on that and on this deal I don't see how the Angels got him for less. I think this was a situation where they wanted to keep their best player happy. This was not a team friendly Evan Longoria, 6 year $36M deal. If the union guys think he is not paid well, that is their issue. I don't know how they can look at Cano and Pujols 10-240 and think Trout is going to get $380M over 10 years just four years later. I think the union wants a guy like Trout to go through each step of abrbitration so they have new records to go off of. With a deal like this, the ceiling is still Ryan Howard or whoever.