Major League Baseball teams are 30 different versions of Demi Moore in “Indecent Proposal” right now, rolling in beds of cash as the industry barrels toward $10 billion in annual revenue. Here’s how huge the money is: The two biggest-spending teams in a slow offseason are among the handful that Forbes said lost money in 2014.

View photos Jordan Zimmermann's contract has set the bar for free agency. (AP Photo) More

When the teams ostensibly bleeding money find themselves empowered to throw around tens of millions like it’s no big deal, it is the greatest proof yet that the market has changed and a new reality is upon baseball. If it wasn’t evident in Toronto guaranteeing J.A. Happ and Marco Estrada $12 million and $13 million a year, respectively, the moment arrived Sunday, when the Detroit Tigers reportedly handed Jordan Zimmermann a five-year, $110 million deal.

Zimmermann, 29, has been a very good pitcher. Over the last five seasons, his adjusted ERA is 11th among starters with at least 700 innings. He is tied with Felix Hernandez, ahead of Max Scherzer and Jon Lester, who received a combined $365 million in free agency last year. At the same time, Zimmermann is coming off the worst full season of his career – and is more than half a decade separated from Tommy John surgery, which makes committing another half-decade that much riskier.

And yet here he is, a $22 million-a-year man, reminding us that neither $20 million-plus annual salaries nor nine-figure contracts mean quite what they used to. The going rate for a decent, healthy free agent starter is about what Happ and Estrada fetched, and anyone of Zimmermann’s ilk could well double it.

As much as this abhors some fans, they must understand: This is players getting their fair share. They are the product, the reason people watch the game, and the best players deserve the most money. So long as the agreed-upon system is backward enough that more money funnels into past-their-prime free agents and the best young talents are underpaid relative to their performance, this is how the system stays equitable and how labor wars are avoided.

Baseball’s 30 teams combined are worth nearly $40 billion, according to one high-ranking source familiar with the numbers, which dovetail with Forbes’ $36 billion estimate at the beginning of last season. Clubs are raking in an estimated $70 million more in annual revenue per season than less than half a decade ago, the success of cable TV contracts and baseball’s Internet arm fueling the boom.

Even a team like Detroit, with a pair of $25 million-plus-per-year players in Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander helping contribute to a reported loss in excess of $20 million in 2014, saw itself in a good enough position for a Greektown-style dice roll on Zimmermann. Surely the Tigers understand that a player with past arm troubles is likelier to experience ones in the future; they experienced it last season, with Anibal Sanchez – he of the Tommy John and labrum surgeries – struggling mightily before a rotator cuff injury shut him down for the season.

They’re banking on Zimmermann being different, and maybe he will be, and maybe he won’t. And perhaps the Tigers aren’t the finest example of free agent spending because owner Mike Ilitch has shown willful disregard for profit in pursuit of championships. For everyone who calls Rick Porcello’s $20.75 million-a-year extension an anomaly and Lester’s $25.8 million-a-year deal an overpay, though, there are the realists who look at Zimmermann becoming the first Tommy John survivor to reach nine figures and realize this is what baseball in 2015 looks like.

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