Raise your hand if you think this whole Cabrera to third thing will work. Put your hand down!
For years now I’ve been forecasting the day when baseball GM’s (sports GM’s really, but baseball is the worst offender) rub their eyes, focus their vision, look around at the mess they’ve wrought and realize they’re a bunch of idiots wasting insane amounts money. Then Prince Fielder gets signed for $214 million to play at first base, you know, the position that Miguel Cabrera was manning for the Tigers.
Some day teams will do a better job of paying players what they’re actually worth, when they’re worth it, but that day has not yet come. Instead, if anything, baseball has doubled down on the days of the mega-contract. From John Lackey to Jayson Werth to Albert Pujols, teams are lining up to pay players enormous fortunes for … well, something, but not what you should expect from a 37 year old athlete with a million miles on his body. With that in mind I wanted to re-approach baseball’s largest contracts ever and see which, if any, paid off.
That's over $3.4 billion dollars, and most of the deals are bad.
The table above shows baseball’s twenty largest contracts ever. The ones highlighted in yellow are either already certifiable busts, or have a high probability of being busts when all’s said and done. That total’s twelve of the deals on the list. That’s a lot of money down the drain. Let’s focus on some of the worst and best.
Alex Rodriguez should get his own paragraph because he probably has the best and worst contracts on the list. He was superb during the lifetime of his first contract and is on a collision course with a legal settlement with the Yankees during his second one. Apparently the Angels forgot how old Albert Pujols will be in five years.
Vernon Wells, of course, deserves a monument in the awful contracts hall of fame. Only Alex Rodriguez made more money last year. That may well be the worst contract of all time, although Carl Crawford is working hard to wrestle the title away from him.
The Barry Zito and Jayson Werth deals also stick out, just because at no point in their careers were these guys ever among the twenty best players in the game for more than a single season, if that, but they’ve managed to get two of the biggest deals in the game’s history. I’m not sure if I should be proud of them or their agents.
The deals, of course, weren’t all bad. Miguel Cabrera is on his way to being one of the game’s best hitters of all time. Todd Helton may not be the most popular player, but he was solid for the Rockies during that deal. CC Sabathia has continued to impress in pinstripes. And, of course, Derek Jeter was excellent during the entirety of his signature, $189 million deal. Unfortunately, there’s more good than bad on that list and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.
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8 Responses to They’ll just never learn
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TIQ IQ
I am not so sure MLB executives are a bunch of idiots, at least not according to the record profits and franchise values most are enjoying. Too often we fixate on the size of contracts without taking into account the entirety of the business.
Also, I don’t agree that all the yellow contracts are busts, particularly the ones at the top of the list.
Agreed. The only ones that look like definite busts to me are Zito, Wells, Santana (due to his injury) and Soriano (off the top of my head). It would be extraordinarily premature to write the other yellow contracts off as likely busts, though a number of them (Werth, Howard, an A-Rod 2.0) looked bad from the start.
Albert Pujols is older than the Angels think, at least 2-3 yrs older. He will disappoint in a few yrs for sure!
I agree he’s at least 34-5 yrs right now!!
Way too early to give a verdict on a lot of those contracts. We may judge the Fielder one to be risky, but we have no idea how he’ll end up aging. Think about, say, Bonds’ last contract, and how bad it must of looked to hand out that kind of money to someone his age. Same for the Pujols contract.
I’d also add that the way some teams budget, unspent financial resources poof out of existence for the MLB team if they opt not to spend them. This is the justification for overpaying someone like Jayson Werth – the Nationals may have had to overpay to get a big time to come to DC. Of course, Werth’s first season went about as bad as it can too.
Put another way: Sometimes the free agent market lacks enough highly talented players that the market power slides to the players. Therefore, you have to overpay to get result. There are more cost-effective ways to assemble together wins, but those opportunities aren’t always present, even if the demand/money is.
Looking back on the first Arod deal that may be as close to worth it as any contract that size can be. Between the Rangers and the Yankees he won, what, 3 MVP’s and put up numbers that could almost be a hall of fame career.
I dont disagree with putting Tex in the yellow if you have to pick one or the other. But not terrible odds that one still works out somewhat close to even, right? The second AROD contract also belongs in yellow, but I cannot agree with it being worst ever. At least he, so far, has been overpaid to be very good. And 2009 worked out well.
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