I’m not sure Cespedes has another gear there.
Pablo Sandoval has lost his job to a guy who makes about 3% what he does. And weighs about half, too. That has something to do with it.
And when Travis Shaw fades, Brock Holt should play 3B over Sandoval.
Is there a major league player making more than Pablo Sandoval who has been relegated to bench status despite being available to play? (So I’m excluding players on the DL.)
Shaw is a decent hitter. If they think he’s ready to play third full time (Shaw has mostly played first base) he might do fine. It’s not the worst situation.
Nick Swisher is getting almost as much, and was just released.
CC Sabathia is making more and probably should be released.
Josh Hamilton is being paid more by the Angels to play for a different team.
It’s still worth it.
What’s Bobby Bonilla up to these days?
I just had to look to make sure the Dodgers aren’t still paying Andruw Jones.
Aren’t the Mets still playing a long retired player who signed a bizarre contract paying out over many years?
If a guy is released or playing for another team that doesn’t count. I wanna know if Sandoval is the best paid benchwarmer in the majors. I guess they’d let him DH if David Ortiz wasn’t around.
There’s nothing wrong with deferred compensation contracts. Think of them as annuities. The team isn’t actually paying a guy not to play; they’re just paying him now for the playing he did earlier. They may even be smart deals for a guy who’d be prone to just pissing it all away earlier if he got it all earlier.
He barely beats out Rusney Castillo on the Red Sox alone (the guy’s only going to start against lefties while Holt is the regular LF).
His hitting took a dive last year, too, not just his defense. Hitting lefty-only didn’t seem to help. The plan is for Hanley Ramirez to take over at DH next year with Shaw moving back to 1B, assuming Shaw can make the adjustments and stay a major-league hitter. If Hanley can play 1B the way he couldn’t play LF (it’s true), he might stay there longer while the DH slot gets rotated or filled by someone else or by Sandoval if he gets shamed into doing his work. But I’d expect him to be trade bait for the Padres or Angels, maybe A’s, at midseason once Boston knows how much more depth in the rotation they’ll need.
I think Rusney’s “only” making eleven or twelve million this year. Boy, that deal looks like a disaster too, though.
I’ve never fully grasped the problem with Bonilla’s contract, either. It strikes me as being genius to get a player to take money 25 years from now rather than today. The Bonilla deal didn’t work great for reasons unrelated to when they paid him the money, but a million or two a year isn’t nearly as big a deal now as it was in 1993, right?
Like, suppose the Blue Jays and Jose Bautista are talking contract. Bautista wants $120 million over four years. The Blue Jays say “No way. Hits the budget real hard right now. But I’ll tell you what… make it $95 million and we’ll throw you two million a year for 25 years after that.”
Someone 25 years from now will complain Bautista is being payed to eat Cheetos, but really it’s just a way for the team to spread the money out. I’m surprised more teams don’t do this. And as you point out, it offers the player a degree of income insurance.
At least having him on the bench leaves open the possibility that the Red Sox derive some benefit from him.
You know, people joke about how baseball players don’t have to be in shape.
Well, Pablo Sandoval. Sandoval was a terrific player when he was 24, but now he sucks, and what’s the explanation? He’s fat. It breaks your body down. Baseball is really hard, and betting on a fat guy to succeed long term is a terrible bet.
Hush, you.
You’re thinking about this too rationally. Presumably you and other Blue Jays fans like Jose Bautista, and appreciate his contributions to the franchise.
But look. Think back on whatever was the worst time you’ve ever had as a baseball fan. Every team has been through one, and chances are you know it immediately. The time when your team was awful and unlikable, with no hope for improvement, bad management, bad general management, hideous repulsive toilet bowl of a stadium. The time when your team almost, though not quite, made you hate baseball.
Now think of the one individual person you think of as most emblematic of that time period - the one person who most exemplified everything that made those years unbearable. Now imagine that the people running the team back then had contrived to ensure that this one individual person would still be connected to your team two decades later… that you’d never escape him, even after he’d retired from ruining your favorite sport and gone on to, presumably, kicking puppies professionally.
Wouldn’t that irritate you?
No, I think Brock Holt plays 3B, Shaw moves to 1B and Hanley DH. Pablo gets paid around $18M/yr through 2019, after which time the Sox will buy him out for $5M.
I’ve said a hundred times here I know, but man I hated that signing. His last year in SF wasn’t that great. If you hit under .280 you better hit for serious power or walk a lot. He does neither.