They did suffer for losing him. Since 2003 they’ve been terrible almost every year, which means they wasted most of Ichiro’s career and at least the early part of Felix Hernandez’s career. If they’d built something consistent with the money they’d saved, you’d have a point, but they didn’t. The Rangers got a few great seasons out of Rodriguez and then traded him for players that helped them form the core of their current team, and the Yankees also got some great seasons out of him and won the series in 2009. The Mariners just saved money and then went out and signed guys like Chone Figgins. They were a very good team when they had him and Griffey and Johnson, and then they lost those players, and pretty soon they sucked.
Saving money is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And for the Angels it isn’t even really an issue. They are almost sure to get insane value out of Trout for the next few years, but if it ends up making it harder for them to keep him after that, they’ll probably regret it.
I’m not eliding it. I’m asking you point blank “they had one really good year- so what?” They haven’t made the playoffs since then. They were good in 2002 and 2003, and since then they’ve had one good season and seven last-place finishes. They didn’t overpay A-Rod, true, although if he’d given them the production he gave the Yankees and Texas over the first seven years it wouldn’t have been overpaying. With the money Seattle saved, they overpaid lots of other guys who weren’t as good and they wasted Ichiro’s career. Despite all the money the Yankees and Rangers paid the guy, they got much more out of it. The Angels don’t have to pay Trout $200 million a year now, which is why they aren’t doing it, but I’m not sure if lowballing him like this is worth the risk and I think your proposal that they trade him away when he’s 25 or 26 as a rental is ridiculous and makes no sense. You learned the wrong lesson from the A-Rod thing. The lesson is not “long contracts are bad.” It’s “long contracts late in the player’s career are bad.” Look at Evan Longoria or Gio Gonzalez.
Yes, it was about a week after he was called up from the minors. It has to be too late to sign Trout to a deal like that one - six years and $44 million tops - but you would think they could offer him long term security and probably get very good value. Then again maybe they’re just taking the risk that they’ll be able to do something like that (at a higher price tag) in two years with some other deals off their books.
A-Rod was at the same age and the same stage in his career when the Rangers signed him as Trout will be when he’s eligible for free agency. That was a foolish signing, now that we have some perspective on it. How is that “late in A-rod’s career”?
I’ll wait until the contracts are over, thanks–then I’ll look at them, and I may not have nice things to say.
The first time you brought this up, you talked about the Yankees’ investment in him, which I thought meant the contract he signed after the 2007 season. Like I said, he was 32 then and not comparable to Trout today or in a few years. If you look at how he played under the original contract, I think you have to conclude he lived up to it. The Rangers just blew it by putting the wrong players around him, and it wasn’t because they couldn’t afford better players: they gave Chan Ho Park something like $13 million a year and I think that was the same year they signed Rodriguez. Like I said, over those seven years he was worth about 100 wins over replacement, averaged almost 50 home runs a year, and pick whatever other stats you like. He was outstanding. (Cheating, but outstanding.) He went on to play very well for the Yankees and they made the playoffs every year through 2007. Even the first two years of the new contract he still played very well. So if that’s your comparison to Trout, it’s hard to explain why the Angels should be afraid to pay him. They don’t have to pay him, of course, and that’s reason enough for them not to. But your attitude seems to be that long term contracts are a bad idea, and you’re wrong. They don’t have to do it now, but signing a young guy when he’s cheap and getting his peak years at a reasonable price makes sense. If you trade him away for prospects in three or four years, it’s unlikely any of those prospects is going to turn into another Mike Trout. And saving money is good, but the Angels are rich and saving money isn’t the goal here. They are not operating on the A’s budget. Maybe they can make this up to Trout in a couple of years and pay him the kind of money they’re paying guys who are passing or already past their prime, or maybe they’re alienating a better, younger player in a way that could really hurt them.
The Mariners missed the playoffs in 2002 and 2003 by margins they probably could have made up had they had him, so I don’t think it’s true they suffered for not having him. The 2003 team, which missed the playoff by two games, certainly makes it with A-Rod at short instead of Carlos Guillen, not that Guillen was a bad player.
I don’t understand why the Rangers’ signing of A-Rod was foolish. They paid to get the best player in the game and that is precisely what they got. They were certainly very foolish in the manner in which they assembled their pitching staff, but that’s a different decision. Then the Yankees traded for him and he was still the best player in the game; they ot more brilliant play out of him AND a few playoff spots (no way in hell New York makes the postseason in 2005 without A-Rod.) Over the course of the 10 years the Rangers agreed to, Rodriguez did enough just in that span to merit being elected to the Hall of Fame.
Going back to Trout’s 2013 salary: I can understand the appeal of going out of your way to keep your superstar happy while the cost is so little, but, OTOH, I think the risk to the Angels is basically nil. Regardless of whether they pay him $510K or $610K, Trout’s still going to try to get as much as possible out of arbitration, and when it comes time to sign him to a long-term deal this perceived slight will be so far in the rear view mirror as to be meaningless. Whether or not Anaheim gets a meaningful hometown discount will have to do with the day-to-day of Trout’s life as an Angel over the next 5 years.
It would be some crazy, hard-core shit if Trout carried around a “revenge is a dish best served cold” attitude over this all the way through 2017.
You don’t? They paid, and then overpaid by a considerable margin, to get the best player in the game, BY BIDDING AGAINST THEMSELVES, and thus depriving themselves of the money to pay for an adequate pitching staff and lineup. This isn’t hard to figure out. Generally when someone pays you 67 million dollars for taking a contract off their hands, it’s an admission that they signed a contract that was stupid beyond belief. But you’re all “I dunno whut they did that was foolish”? Ask them. They’ll tell you.
And ask a Yankee fan if A-Rod has been worth his contract. The trend in baeball, which I am so critical of here and you (and Marley) are being foolishly supportive of, is paying top dollar far into the future, essentially agreeing to pay players at advanced ages so far distant that you can’t reasonably predict that they’ll be playing All-Star baseball (or in A-Rod’s case right now, playing baseball at all). This policy makes sense in the immediate future, which is all most GMs have to look forward to and all many fans care about, so they get away with it but I don’t think much of the move.
I think it may be wise for the Angels to say that what they own is the right to sign Trout to six yearly contracts, one year at a time, never paying more than market rate and for the first two years paying rockbottom rates. After that, he will demand a ten-year contract, but if they swap him out for prospects first, they’ll get some good young players back and let the long term deal become someone else’s risk. It’s true that these young players may not become Trout-level superstars (though they could) but it’s also true that they’ll be good cheap players and the Angels can use the millions they’ll be saving to sign up other good players.
Why do you keep comparison ARod’s first contract (signed in winter of 1999/2000) with his second contract (signed in 2007)? And why do you compare either of these to Mike Trout? None of them are applicable to each other.
People keep saying this, and it remains completely untrue. During his tenure with the Rangers, the Rangers were paying more to the rest of the team than the Oakland A’s were paying to their entire club, and the A’s didn’t stink. They were paying more to the rest of the club than the Twins, and the Twins were a very good team. In fact, if you remove A-Rod’s salary from the Rangers’ total, they would still have been above the AL average payroll. In 2003, the Rest Of The Rangers made more money than 10 of the other 13 teams in the American League. Why could the Rangers not assemble a good team? It wasn’t for a lack of salary, because they had lots and lots of it left over. The idea that the Rangers were depriving the rest of the squad of players to pay A-Rod is just plainly false; they were spending more than enough money to assemble a good team. The only way you can argue that A-Rod’s contract cost them the ability to put together a good team is if you argue that for some economic reason I am unaware of, the Texas Rangers of 2001-2003 were in some unique fiscal position where they, and only they, were unable to put together a competent ballclub without spending more money than anyone in baseball except the Yankees without having one star player making a lot more than anyone else. They picked the wrong guys.
Indeed, the Boston Red Sox in 2003 has almosat the same salary layout; about the same overall team salary and they were paying Manny Ramirez about as much as A-Rod was getting. So why could Texas not win laying out the same dollars Boston was?
I don’t care because they aren’t paying the bills. (And I suspect if you asked in 2005 they were damn happy.) They had the money and they got the best player in baseball. The contract EXTENSION was a terrible mistake. Accepting the contract the Rangers gave them, however, was a great move.
This has turned into a hijack, so to steer it back toward Trout: long term contracts always involve some risk, but they are a fact of baseball. Smartly applied - for example in signing a young guy approaching his prime instead of a guy who is already at his peak or past it - it can save a team a lot of money. The Angels may do that with Trout in two years. They could do that now, but they don’t have to, so they aren’t. Maybe that will hurt them if they alienate the guy, and I don’t know if that’s a risk worth taking he would still be very cheap if they bumped his salary 50%. But maybe he’ll be over it in two years.
Well, yes, that’s exactly my point. With most long term contracts, the fans are delirious for the first few seasons, when the player is still at the top of his game, and the team succeeds. I’m asking you to ask NOW about having most of the team’s budget tied up in aging, mediocre ballplayers. Not so much with the delirious.
Well, I’d say that part of it made some sense, in that A-Rod continued to be productive at a relatively young age and the Yankees got a lot of money back from Texas so his contract wasn’t at killer levels. It was a gamble that worked out, but the Yankees couldn;t leave well enough alone and turned it into a self-caused disaster of exactly the sort I’m identifying with the Trout contract potentially. The number of excellent players whose careers do NOT continue at star levels into their mid-thirties is MUCH than you are assuming.
Take Mantle, the player Trout is often compared to. He had a very long, very productive career, but if the Yankees had signed him to a ten year deal, say, in 1960, when he was 29, at top dollar they would have prospered for a few years, as Mantle had some great seasons after 1960, but after 1962 he fell off some, and after 1964 he was just another good player who was finished by 1968. Some might consider that money well spent, but under those circumstances I might have done better to have traded Mantle instead of signing the ten-year, megabux contract–can you imagine the prospects he would have fetched in 1960?
This idea is what prompted the thread. I know that I don’t live in the world of contracts that can reasonably measured in fractions of a billion dollars, but I think that if I magically teleported into Trout’s situation, I’d be inclined to say “Fuck the Angels.” Another team, maybe a perennial contender like St. Louis or something, offers me a monster contract, at just a hair less than the Angels, I’m gone, boom, I am a dot on the horizon. It’s not the money - right now, I’m doing OK for a 20-year-old, making $510K instead of a big raise to $650K or something. Bummer, but the idea that they just bent over for Pujols and Hamilton and won’t kick me a hundred G’s is what kills me.
But where does it end? You can make a very reasonable argument that Mike Trout was worth in the neighborhood of $40 million to the Angels last year. Why be satisfied with a bump from 500 to 650? Why not 750? $1m?
The players collectively bargained this CBA. Teams are under no obligation to give guys like Trout a single dollar over what they have to. Presumably, every extra dollar given to a rookie comes out of the pocket of a veteran, who I’m sure aren’t reluctant to mention it if necessary.
The thing about Fielder “spurning” the Brewers because of perceived slights in the past (like small rookie raises) is essentially a fiction. The Brewers offered him a 5 year, $105m deal the year before free agency, which he declined. When they learned of his demands upon becoming a free agent, they never made him a competitive offer. He ultimately signed for 9 years $214m with the Tigers, an offer the Brewers were never going to come close to touching.
Right. But that can’t happen until 2017 at the earliest, and the Angels may be figuring time will heal all wounds - that or the raise Trout will get before then.
It would basically be a show of good faith on the team’s part. I think everybody understands that the Angels are allowed to do what they did. The 50% bump was a hypothetical and he would still be extremely cheap at that price, but it would show they were not taking the hardest possible line just because they could. The issue here is that they might be alienating the guy over 0.1% of their 2013 payroll.
In theory, I have absolutely NO problem with teams playing hardball, and forcing whiny players to live up to their contracts.
And if, say, the Pirates or Royals were doing something like this (figuring the ideal thing would be to get 3 stellar years from a young star at a bargain basement price before inevitably losing him), I’d say that was a smart move.
But I confess, I’m baffled by the Angels’ behavior. The Angels are HAVES, not have nots. They have plenty of money, and Artie Moreno has never been shy about spending it. The way they’re treating Trout is inexplicable in logical terms. I can’t help wondering if Trout has given management some reason for PERSONAL animosity, because I can’t think of any other sane reason to lowball him like this OR to move him out of center field.
If it ISN’T personal, it seems idiotic to disrespect a young superstar so blatantly.