I was just about to tweet out a congratulations to the Seattle Mariners and CEO Howard Lincoln for walking away from negotiations when Jay Z allegedly changed the terms of a nearly agreed upon 9-year deal by requesting a 10th.

But before I could get to my desk to start typing, news emerged that the parties were back at the table and that Cano would, in fact, get his 10th year — and $240 million to boot.

Way to hold firm, Mariners.

In so inking the league’s best second baseman to a 10-year deal, Seattle managed to outbid its only competitor by three years and a total of $65 million. Yes, the New York Yankees – the last organization in professional sports anyone would consider an example of fiscal restraint – reportedly would go no higher than seven years and $175 million for Cano who, by the way, will be 41 when this deal expires in 2023.

This isn’t anything against Cano personally. He’s a career .309 hitter. He’s got 204 homeruns in nine seasons (albeit benefitting from one of the league’s most friendly homerun hitting parks). He’s got a .355 OBP and a .504 SLG and he plays good defense. Cano was clearly the top free agent on the board and he deserved to be rewarded handsomely for his play.

But did he deserve 10 years and $240 million? The fact is that the teams that have inked the largest contracts of all time, whether they say so or not, would be foolish to look back at those deals and say they’d gotten their money’s worth. Contracts approaching double-digits in years for this kind of nine-figure investment have proven to be bad business for major league owners.

Look no further than those Yankees, whose sudden discovery of such fiscal restraint probably had something to do with being saddled with the contract of Alex Rodriguez at a ridiculously inflated salary during his declining years. It’s no accident that this past season the team reportedly was looking into ways to cancel the deal — one they gave when they had all the leverage in the world after ARod opted out only to find he had no other suitors.

Or, if the Yankees are too far away geographically, saunter on down the west coast a few thousand miles to Los Angeles where, in back to back off seasons, the Angels have given obnoxiously stupid money to Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton.

The organization, which traditionally has been pretty competitive without making blinding investments in free agency, has been rewarded with back-to-back third place finishes in the AL West. In 2012, the team won 89 games and got from Pujols 30 homeruns, 105 RBI and a .285 average in 154 games. That’s not a bad season, but does it come close to justifying the the expense associated with that deal? And that was the first year of the deal – he’s on the books until 2021 if he decides to stick around.

The 2013 season was even worse. The Angels won 78 games. Pujols hit .258 with 17 homers in 99 games and appeared to be physically breaking down. Hamilton played 154 games, but hit .250 with 21 homers and 79 RBI. Decent? Maybe. Coming close to being worth the ridiculous money he got? Not even close.

Or how about the sixth-largest deal? Detroit has already traded Prince Fielder. The eighth-largest? The Twins have had three straight disastrous seasons, Joe Mauer just finished the 2013 season on the disabled list with concussion issues and will now move to first base. The ninth? How about the injury-plagued seasons the Yankees have put up with from Mark Teixeira in recent years?

At least the Yankees appear to have learned their lesson. They’re going about losing Cano much like the St. Louis Cardinals did when they lost Pujols. They are using the money not spent on their second baseman to replace his production in the lineup with guys like Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann and Carlos Beltran. They’re rich deals to be sure. But they aren’t landscape altering deals that tie a team in at huge numbers for a decade. Now the Yankees have a hole to fill in the infield, but they’ll no doubt find some way to field a competitive team on opening day.

The Mariners, meanwhile, ignored recent history in anteing up this kind of money on the season’s biggest free agent prize. Lincoln should have stuck to his guns. He had a chance to walk away and prove that perhaps there exists an owner or two who could look at the evidence around him and walk away when a deal started to look too rich.

Instead, he gave Jay Z a huge win in his first player contract dealing. He just locked in the fourth largest deal of all time. And he proved that in an industry full of people with more money and power than they know what to do with that there will always be someone out there who will never learn from the past.

And I’ve got a couple bucks in my wallet I’d comfortably wager that instead of this being the move that brings Seattle back to relevance in Major League Baseball it instead becomes an albatross that keeps the Mariners closer to the cellar in the AL West for the bulk of the next decade.