In December 1984, National League club owners gathered at the MLB winter meetings in Houston. They had something important to discuss. One of their own had drawn up a shocking, unprecedented contract for a free agent: Atlanta owner Ted Turner had offered six years and more than $9 million to reliever Bruce Sutter.
This could have been perfectly fine, except that roughly half of that money would be deferred, scheduled to be paid out with interest in annual installments from 1991 to 2021.
It was unheard of. (Though, to be fair, plenty was unheard of: Free agency was still less than a decade old.) There was nothing to forbid deferring a large portion of a contract. But it didn’t sit right with the other owners. With the high interest rates of the time, Sutter’s final payout would be much, much more than $9.1 million—some $45 million. That was the figure that had originally been reported, splashed across headlines, declaring it the biggest sports contract in the world. (Sutter would take the title of highest-paid athlete from quarterback Steve Young of the USFL.) What kind of precedent did Sutter’s deal set? The practice made other baseball clubs nervous.
