You know how contestants on The Price Is Right would sometimes bid low just to kind of have a placeholder in case everyone else was over? That’s what the White Sox did by offering Manny Machado $175 over seven years ($25M AAV), the very low end of previous contract estimates. Bruce Levine has been adamant about the seven-year duration despite multiple contradictory reports, and had pegged an AAV from $25-30 million.
The White Sox offer to Machado is for $175 million, over seven years. In some ways, their approach is like Boston's w/ J.D. Martinez last winter — the Red Sox offered $100 million and waited for two months.