If seven years is where White Sox want to go with Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, is it possibly a compromise on opt-outs?

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Who knows if the White Sox have made any promises when it comes to the length of a contract offer to Bryce Harper or Manny Machado.

Conflicting reports were the story of the day Wednesday, with ESPN's Jeff Passan writing the White Sox were willing to guarantee Harper a 10-year deal just hours before The Score's Bruce Levine tweeted the White Sox aren't going to make either Harper or Machado an offer that lasts more than seven years.

Whichever of those ends up as more accurate, the idea of a seven-year contract offer brought this idea to mind: What if it's the White Sox version of a compromise on opt-outs?

Opt-out clauses are all the rage in big-money deals these days. They allow a high-priced player to end a long-term commitment early, with the idea being that if he continues playing at this level, he'll get another huge payday sooner rather than later, with sooner perhaps being an opportunity that wouldn't have otherwise existed at all given his age. There's a bunch of these in baseball. Clayton Kershaw just chose to stick with his original contract rather than become a free agent this offseason. In the NBA, LeBron James famously (or infamously, if you live in Cleveland) used his opt-out clause to head to the Los Angeles Lakers.

With Harper and Machado both just 26 years old, it wouldn't be at all surprising for them to try and convince teams to give them opt-outs, allowing them to get another big contract just a few years from now. And that would be a fine risk to take for a team like the Los Angeles Dodgers or the New York Yankees, who would use these players to potentially win multiple championships in the short term.

But for the White Sox, giving an opt-out makes no sense at all, especially if that opt-out came in the first three or four years of the deal. The White Sox are trying to convince these guys to sign up for the long term, to join with Eloy Jimenez, Michael Kopech, Dylan Cease and Luis Robert — four players with a grand total of four major league games under their collective belt — and form a contender for the better part of the next decade. Spending short-term dollars on a player who could leave before the apex of that contention period doesn't make sense.

So is a seven-year offer the compromise?

A 10-year contract would keep Harper or Machado on the South Side until they're 36, and while that'd likely be a good thing for the White Sox, it wipes out the potential for them to sign another monster big-money deal. They'd be too old to get that kind of contract. But a seven-year deal would put Harper and Machado at 33 the next time free agency would come around, and that's young enough to get another rich contract, even if it's not another decade-long contract. It's still another nine-figure deposit into their bank accounts, potentially a greater one than would have remained over the final three seasons of a 10-year deal.

And that could be an intriguing thing for these mega free agents. As intriguing as an opt-out after three or four or five seasons? Maybe not. But perhaps more intriguing, if not quite as lucrative in the immediate, than a 10-year deal? Maybe.

This is all speculation, but in a sweepstakes like this, perhaps a compromise like this ends up being the difference.

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