The Cubs should be considering deferred free agent contracts

News item: Dylan Cease signs with the Blue Jays for a deal that includes deferred money:

The Blue Jays are making a major splash at the top of the rotation. Toronto is in agreement with Dylan Cease on a seven-year contract, pending a physical. It’s reportedly a $210MM guarantee for the Boras Corporation client, though it includes deferred money that’ll drop the average annual value for luxury tax purposes to roughly $26MM. That puts the net present value closer to $182MM.

The Dodgers have made a bit of a parlor game out of signing players to deals similar to this with deferred money, the most famous of which, of course, is the Shohei Ohtani deal that pays him very little while he’s actually playing for the Dodgers, deferring most of the money for many years.

The question I want to raise here is: Why aren’t more teams doing this, specifically the Cubs? This would reduce current payroll, keep the team under the luxury tax, and pay any players who sign with the team the money they are signing for — but the money’s kept in an escrow account, presumably earning interest for the team, while inflation eats away some of the value of the contract when the player actually gets the money.

What am I missing here? I can’t say I’m any sort of expert on economic matters, but it seems to me this sort of thing is a huge win for any team that signs a player to a contract of this type.

If the Cubs, for example, had signed Cease to a deal identical to the one the Blue Jays gave him, they’d still be well under the 2026 first luxury tax level of $244 million and, presumably, make money themselves on the money they’d be deferring over the seven-year term of the contract. If Cease and Ohtani (and other Dodgers) are accepting these sorts of contracts, why wouldn’t other free agents?

Mainly, I wanted to open this up as a discussion topic as we await MLB’s Winter Meetings next week, a time when perhaps more player movement will happen.

Have at it.