As a Mariner fan, Richie Sexson hasn’t lived up to his contract.
In 2007 he hit a hair above the Mendoza line (.207) with 21HRs. He should make about $14 million this year.
We shouldn’t limit the discussion to just recent bad signings. Cleveland fans took a long time to get over Wayne Garland’s 1977 contract for 10 years, $2M ($200,000 per year), which was a HUGE deal at the time. Garland had just gone 20-7 for the Orioles, then proceeded to go 28-48 over the next 5 years with the Indians.
More recently, Keith Hernandez signed 2 year deal with the Indians for the 1990-91 seasons at $1,750,000 per year, and then got hurt and played in only 43 games with a .200 BA. That rat was healthy enough to guest star on “Seinfeld” though.
While not big money compared to now, I present to you Wayne Garland, who got a 10 year contract for his 20-7 year, and rewarded them with crap.
And zamboniracer beats me to the punch with Garland. Drat!
Well, as others have noted, if this WAS a bad signing, it was quite different than the types that RickJay talks about in the OP.
Both of the OP’s categories (Surprise Bomb and NoShit, Sherlock) refer to players who get big contracts and then (surprisingly or otherwise) fail to perform. You can hardly say that about A-Rod during his time with Texas. He OPSed over 1.000 during his time there, averaged exactly 50 homers per season, and won 1 MVP and placed 2nd and 6th in MVP voting the other two years.
It may be that he was a bad signing if his massive contract tied up so much money that the Rangers were unable to field a competitive team around him. But, like Marley23 says, that wouldn’t be his fault. He can’t play all 9 positions on the field, and he can’t turn the other players into MVPs by his mere presence on the team. When you pay for a player, all he can do is give you the best possible performance, and i think that’s pretty much what A-Rod did.
I wasn’t following baseball as closely back when he was with the Rangers, and i certainly wasn’t paying much attention to the Rangers themselves. Does anyone have an opinion on whether A-Rod’s contract was, in fact, so big that it fucked up their ability to build a good team?
As for my own contribution to this thread, it’s nowhere near the $20-million-a-year type of mistake that the Giants have made with Zito, but i continue to be amazed that the Dodgers are paying almost $9 million a year for Juan Pierre, a guy who has a career OPS+ of 84, and who has OPSed better than league average exactly once in his 7 full seasons of major league ball. This is a guy whose slugging percentage is habitually almost equal to his on-base percentage. He’s slugged over .400 twice in his career, and then only just. He’s also been a below-average fielder for the past 5 seasons. The Dodgers owe him another $30 million after this year. I know that’s not a huge amount in modern baseball, but surely they could have gotten better value for money.
The Rangers, if I recall correctly, were anteing up $90 million and up for the whole roster. Even after cutting A-Rod’s cheques, they were still able to fork out a pretty fair number of clams to fill out the roster.
By comparison, they were paying out more money to all their players OTHER than A-Rod than the Oakland A’s were paying to their entire team, their manager, their GM and all their coaches, and the A’s were making the playoffs every year.
The Rangers were losing because they were incompetent. The record just does not suggest that they would have spent their $20-$25 million on anything that would have made them much better.
I think the Isiah Thomas contract he signed to GM/coach the Knicks ranks right at the top. That contract begat the contracts/trades of Jerome James, Jared Jeffries, Steve Francis, Eddy Curry, Zach Randolph, Stephon Marbury and others that have hamstrung the franchise. Add in sexual harassment, tons of losses, leage laughing stock status, and a few years of being over the cap and having horrible draft picks and you can point to one contract that took a bad situation (the Layden years) and made it immeasurable worse.
Zito is an awful signing, but he’s one man out of 25 on a fairly mediocre team. Isiah’s contract impacted the organization from top to bottom, lead to giving huge boosts to three other teams title runs, and pretty much ruined the sporting fandom lives of a generation of Knick’s fans.
That’s pretty awful.
Were losing? The Rangers are notorious around here for doing decently until the All-Star break, and then falling apart completely.
At least they’re not spending crazy cash to do it anymore…
Why can’t they choose good pitching? They have decent offense, but their pitching is uniformly and consistently sub-par year in and year out.
Thanks. I guess i could have looked up the numbers myself, but your comments confirmed my suspicions. With the right approach, they had enough money to easily build a winning team around A-Rod.
Anyway, another guy who comes to mind as a candidate for your OP (inspired by a blog post i read this evening) is Andruw Jones of the Dodgers. I know it’s less than two months into the season, but he’s being paid almost $15 million a year to really stink the place up right now. If his poor form had only started at the beginning of this season, it might be put down to a short-term slump, but the fact is that he had a pretty mediocre season for the Braves last year as well, with an OPS+ of 88. This year, he’s not only batting well below league average, he’s batting below replacement level.
He might turn it around and make me eat my words, but the almost-$20 million that the Dodgers owe him for next year is not looking like a great investment right now.
[QUOTE=Omniscient]
<snip>
Also, the Ryan Leaf deal isn’t a bad one either. There was almost no reason to think he’d bust the way he did and really he didn’t get paid that much since it was a rookie contract that wasn’t guaranteed.
<snip>
[QUOTE]
True, his rookie contract was only bad in hindsight. Especially considering the talent SD could have gotten at that spot. The Cowboys signing was monumental stupidity at any price, though.
Pah to all of you.
In category #2 I give you Grant Hill, who got $93 million guaranteed despite having a misaligned ankle, and proceeded to play 195 games (out of a possible 492) for the team over the next 6 years - meaning he was paid just under $500,000.00 per game. He missed all of the '03-'04 season and all but four games of the '00-'01 season.
Having $93 million committed to a player who wasn’t actually playing didn’t help much, either.
Then the moment he got better he ditched Orlando for Phoenix to have a shot at the ring. The fact that Orlando got further in the playoffs than Phoenix this year was one of the most satisfying parts of the season.
I suppose you could look at it that way, but the Magic brass only the most cursory attempt to retain him and the fans were pretty much okay with it once it was reported that they hadn’t really offered him a contract.
It was one of those things where I think everyone was just glad to see the end of it. Besides, there’s no reason the injury couldn’t recur, and then we’d be on the hook for another $20 million.
What happened to him, anyway? I mean, he’s just collapsed.
I really don’t know. It could be age or fitness catching up with him, but he’s still only 31. I guess it could be something to do with his swing, but i can’t make any reasonable arguments about that.
One aspect of baseball analysis where i’m perfectly willing to admit my deficiencies is in working out what has gone wrong with a particular player’s “mechanics,” as the experts like to say. I’ve only been following the game for the last 8 years (and only about 4 really seriously), and i’m still catching up on the history and the general lore, as well as the sabermetric stuff. I can’t look at a pitcher or a hitter and give any meaningful analysis about what is wrong with his pitching action or his swing.
Sometimes, if you show me a slow motion replay and point out things the guy is doing differently, i can see where the difference are, even if it’s not always clear to me why, exactly, those changes lead to particular levels of effectiveness. But there are also times when i just can’t see any difference whatsoever.
Last night, on Baseball Tonight on ESPN, one of the commentators did a slow-motion analysis of Alfonso Soriano’s swing, in an attempt to show why he sucked in the first few weeks of the season, and why he is currently hitting about .560 with 7 home runs over the last 8 games. To be perfectly honest, i couldn’t see one bit of difference between his swing then and his swing now. The commentator talked about his back leg, and opening his hips, and stuff like like, but all the swings he showed looked exactly the same for me, except that some went for hits, and some went for outs. Shrug.
I’m not trying to downplay the importance of the little things in a player’s mechanics, and i’m sure the hitting and pitching coaches of the major league teams do a great deal to help players improve their performance by analyzing and helping to fix their small mechanical problems. It’s just not something i really feel able to comment on with any credibility.
On a tangentially-related matter, it was something of a pleasure to see the guys at Baseball Tonight talk to Peter Gammons last night, i think about the Detroit Tigers. Gammons’ analysis included discussions of OPS and ground ball to fly ball ratios, and similar stuff. Not something you hear very often on TV baseball coverage.
It could have been far, far worse. If he’d had a better year in 2007, I expect he’d have gotten Miguel Cabrera-sized deal.
How about Ricky Williams in the NoShit, Sherlock category? Even at the time, before he got into trouble with marijuana and was a highly touted running back from Texas, everybody thought Ditka overpaid to draft him. And by overpaid I mean Ditka traded ALL of New Orleans’ draft picks from that year, AND next year’s #1 and #3 pick to get him.
True.
I remember reading when the deal was struck that Jones and his manager Scott Boras wanted either a very long deal, or a very short one. It appears they were aware that Jones’ poor 2007 was likely to reduce his market value, so they wanted to either sew up long-term money or get a short contract during which he could raise his performance and come out the other end and sign a big contract to end his career.
If he doesn’t turn things around, his current contract could be the one that ends his career.
I’m pretty sure this would fall in the No Shit, Sherlock category. Jeff Weaver twice laid an egg after signing a big contract. In 2006, he signed a one year, 8 million dollar contract with the Los Angeles (Anaheim) Angels, and rewarded them with a 3-10 record, and an ERA over 6 before being designated for assignment. And in 2007, he signed an equally huge deal with the Seattle Mariners (they apparently based the signing on his World Series performance), and again he bombed out with a 7-10 record, which may not sound horrible, but it should have been worse, considering his ERA again was over 6.
This is a bad deal because he gave up too much, but if we start talking about trades you get into Brock-for-Broglio discussion and that way lies madness.