Ryan Braun's new contract pays him $16-20 million a year starting in the year 2016, and while early analysis of the deal has focused on the way the Milwaukee Brewers have traded a shorter duration for a seriously diminished ability to project Braun's performance over the course of the deal, I think one important facet of the contract extension is being overlooked: The fact that by 2016 Milwaukee is a slave colony under the control of the Reptilian Alliance's Vichy Midwest government.
↵Braun's particular suite of offensive skills and his athleticism and build suggest he'll be a fine hitter into this thirties, but his PECOTA and ZiPS long-term projections don't account for the way he'll be sold into space-slavery following the MLB Dispersal Draft and Space-Slave Sale and subsequently forced into backbreaking labor in the unspeakable methane mines of Charon.
↵Likewise, Braun is a supremely confident athlete, but it's difficult to say just how he'll perform in the clutch when, in 2015, he's forced to watch in a stunned silence as Prince Fielder, lately of the New York Reptilians, is converted into fuel following an 0-5 night in front of a sellout crowd at The House That Reptilians Built.
↵It's like they say: It's one thing to look at the numbers all day in your mom's basement and think you know baseball, but it's another thing entirely to actually watch the games, especially that fateful game this September when Zack Greinke removed his human skin and landed the first wave of Reptilian Alliance attack ships on the field at Miller Park.
↵I'll say this for Ryan Braun's baseball instincts, of course: He knew something was fishy about the roof staying open that day.
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