Revisiting An Old Topic
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 4:53 PM PST
in Seattle Mariners Stats
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PrintFrom the ESPN staff, so you know it's top notch:
(Headline: Worst Contracts In MLB History)
Alex Rodriguez, 2001: 10 years, $252 million. A-Rod, of course, was magnificent with the Rangers, crushing 156 home runs and knocking in 395 runs in his three seasons. The Rangers also lost 89, 90 and 91 games those three years, in part because Rodriguez's monster contract hamstrung the team's payroll.
Since signing that contract, Alex Rodriguez has hit .304/.399/.589 as a great defensive shortstop and, later, as an ~average defensive third baseman. Using some Fangraphs numbers and our own calculations for 2001:
| Year | A-Rod WAR | MLB avg. $/win (m) | $ Deserved (m) |
| 2001 | 10.0 | 2.4 | 24.0 |
| 2002 | 9.9 | 2.6 | 25.7 |
| 2003 | 9.1 | 2.8 | 25.5 |
| 2004 | 6.9 | 3.1 | 21.4 |
| 2005 | 9.5 | 3.4 | 32.3 |
| 2006 | 5.0 | 3.7 | 18.5 |
| 2007 | 9.3 | 4.1 | 38.1 |
| 2008 | 6.3 | 4.5 | 28.4 |
According to WAR (which I know isn't perfect, but stay with me), Alex Rodriguez's worst season since signing that monster contract was equal in value to Alfonso Soriano's career best. And in every other season, A-Rod was considerably better than that.
Alex Rodriguez signed a $252m/10 year contract with the Texas Rangers as a 26 year old shortstop with good defense an unbelievable bat, and for seven years he more than earned that deal before opting out to sign something even bigger (which he then earned in 2008). The Rangers didn't lose because they had the best player in baseball signed to a reasonable contract. They lost because they wasted the rest of their payroll on the likes of Rusty Greer, Juan Gonzalez, Chan Ho Park, Carl Everett, John Rocker, Dave Burba, Todd Van Poppel, Dan Miceli, and Gabe Kapler (as well as countless others).
It's a shame how much crap gets thrown the Rangers' way for signing A-Rod to that contract. Truth be told, signing A-Rod was one of the only things they ever did right.
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Why is Adrian Beltre on the Bavasi memorial?
Regardless I got to say that is a pretty impressive memorial…
Also did Bavasi really make really bad draft picks?
BOOYA! You got Slurved!
Bavasi wasn't responsible for draft picks.
That was Bob Fontaine, who rocked.
Adrian Beltre is on that list because the mass media doesn’t truly understand how valuable he is.
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 5:18 PM PST up reply actions
Hopefully none of the other GMs in baseball do either.
I’m crossing my fingers that the depressed economy together with his under-appreciated contribution will counteract the traditional Boras contract shenanigans and he resigns here for a few years.
My impression at this point
is that the Mariners are going to have to be pretty darn good this year to convince Beltre to re-sign. He doesn’t sound like a guy who wants to stick around that much longer.
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 5:35 PM PST up reply actions
Man if Beltre doesn't stay we might eat Tui alive...
with maybe a side of Mangini… MMMMMMMMMMmmmmmm Mangini…
BOOYA! You got Slurved!
I am 100% prepared to give Tui the butthol treatment
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 5:41 PM PST up reply actions
I don't think it's reasonable to expect all LL-developed inside jokes to go away
That would just make the community dry. Newcomers wouldn’t get any of our nicknames or images either.
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 9, 2009 9:48 AM PST up reply actions
Yeah, would you want to stick around a team where in the home park you absolutely drill the ball
and it dies at the fence?
Unless of course you were playoff-bound on a regular basis.
by Two Rs and Two Ls on Feb 8, 2009 5:37 PM PST up reply actions
If Beltre walks
would we even get any picks? His numbers do not show his value. I am not sure if gold gloves factor into it?
Or does Beltre have to hit like a monster this next year for us to get a first round pick?
Honestly, I would prefer he stayed at this point.
Beltre was ranked as a Type A this year, but right on the border
Since Elias only cares about the most recent two seasons, I believe, he’d have to have a 2009 similar to his 2007 to guarantee the possibility of Type A compensation. He’s all but guaranteed to be at least a Type B, though, barring some kind of catastrophe.
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 7:28 PM PST up reply actions
And catastrophes, I imagine, make him more resignable but less desirable.
by Two Rs and Two Ls on Feb 8, 2009 7:42 PM PST up reply actions
If he does nab Type A,
I wonder if he’ll suffer from the same sort of reduced market that we’re seeing on other Type As with teams more hesitant to give up draft picks as compensation. It’s slight, but it is something that might work in our favor with keeping him around.
How much are the Type A draft picks worth to a team?
1 million? 10 million?
by Edgar for Pres on Feb 8, 2009 8:08 PM PST up reply actions
The other side of that is that, well, Beltre's going to turn 30 in April
where Abreu is 35, Jr. 39, and Pedro Martinez 37. Adam Dunn is 29, but I don’t think the two are the greatest analogues in terms of what smart baseball people think about them.
by Two Rs and Two Ls on Feb 8, 2009 8:28 PM PST up reply actions
Dude, you totally didn't target="blank" the link.
In other news, since this is on topic with that article: that Gary Matthews catch in Texas was one of the most ridiculous baseball catches I have ever seen.
by Two Rs and Two Ls on Feb 8, 2009 5:36 PM PST reply actions
That catch alone is worth 10M/year for 5 years!
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Too bad they turned around and ate money to trade him to New York,
nullifying any good decisions they made in signing him.
I cannot get over how ridiculously stupid that was
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 5:41 PM PST up reply actions
Well, to Page 2's credit...
They do mention that the most ludicrous thing about the Rangers and this contract was the way they ate it for what amounted to almost nothing.
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Playing Devil Advocate
but couldn’t the Rangers have signed him to a more favorable contract?
by JI on Feb 8, 2009 8:33 PM PST up reply actions
Probably
But just because they might’ve been able to do better doesn’t mean they didn’t already do well.
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 9:18 PM PST up reply actions
But Rodriguez' intangibles are terrible! That brings his WAR down a lot.
I’d also like to take this moment to say that I love the use of intangible as a noun. It reminds me so much of ‘unmentionables’ that if I didn’t know it referred to team spirit/media charm/work ethic etc I’d think it referred to genitals.
by Bearskin Rugburn on Feb 8, 2009 6:23 PM PST reply actions
It's a cliche
But A-Rod’s been worth -9 clutch wins in his career. In other words, his career WPA/LI is 55, but his WPA is just 46.
Whether or not clutch hitters are real, the reputation isn’t made up out of thin air. A-Rod really has been terrible when it counts.
It's interesting trying to reconcile that with his .975 OPS in high leverage situations vs. .967 overall
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 8:09 PM PST up reply actions
Or with the fact that his tOPS+ in high leverage situations according to B-REF is 102
.975 OPS. His tOPS+ in extra innings is 108.
The reputation for clutch hitters isn’t made up out of thin air, it’s made up out of isolated instances, anecdotes, and pre-existing ideas about player value.
I don't like B-R's definition of high leverage
Everything above 1.5 LI gets lumped in together. So, you get stuff like this, where A-Rod looks fine as a high leverage hitter, when in reality, he really has been terrible when it counts.
People didn’t invent A-Rod’s unclutch reputation. It’s reality. I’m not arguing that it’s a skill, or it’s A-Rod’s fault, but we can’t pretend that people aren’t actually seeing what has happened.
Seems like it's a definitional issue then.
I can totally understand your point, and think there’s a lot to be said for just tabulating changes in WPA.
But don’t you think there’s also a valid argument for calculating performance in the (much larger) sample of PA’s above some leverage threshold? That is, B-R isn’t adding up the change in WPA, and thus a change in WPA of .2 counts the same as one of .6 or whatever. Still, BOTH situations count as high leverage, and given the much larger sample, I think you can definitely make the case that it’s a decent measure of ‘clutch’ hitting.
So yes, people seem to remember a number of, say, Ks with 1 out and the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th (huuuge WPA hit), but forget HRs with nobody on and 2 outs in the 8th of a tie game (where the WPA impact is big, but perhaps not AS big). To me, BOTH are high-leverage situations, and he’s shown no tendency to fold in all such situations.
I remember looking at that right after I read The Book.
And yeah, it’s pretty staggering to see such a disparity in the WPA/LI and WPA, but he’s still a 46 win player over 2000 games, and that’s a rare commodity.
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No one remembers him single handedly beating the Twins
or hammering on the Yankees in 2000.
by JI on Feb 8, 2009 8:30 PM PST up reply actions
Yes.
But it’s impossible for me to think about Greer without thinking that Chris Snelling was going to be Rusty ver. 2.0.
At least Greer had a solid 5-6 years before his body destroyed him.
He was awesome before the A-Rod contract
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 9:19 PM PST up reply actions
Turns out they paid him over 14 million dollars after his career ended.
by JI on Feb 8, 2009 10:29 PM PST up reply actions
The Mets are paying Bobby Bonilla until 2025
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 10:41 PM PST up reply actions
Nearly $1.2m a year
and by 2025 I meant 2035.
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 11:02 PM PST up reply actions
I believe they're done
but they paid him something like $39m over three years on the 25-man roster while he didn’t play a game.
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 11:15 PM PST up reply actions
I doubt the Orioles played a man short for three years.
that would have been mentioned on ESPN at some point.
by JI on Feb 9, 2009 12:56 AM PST up reply actions
A player done in by his own gritiness
You just don't know when to keep your mouth shut, do you Saxy boy?
by oc on Feb 8, 2009 11:16 PM PST up reply actions
I don't know.
Those are some pretty impressive estimations in your post, and Alex may very well have been worth every penny of his contract. But you can’t deny that his contract did indeed handcuff the team’s payroll.
Some of the other questionable acquistions of that time were Rafael Palmeiro, Richard Hidalgo and Ken Caminiti. Even the dumbest Ranger fans could tell you that John Hart was making some very ill-advised decisions with the players he was signing or trading for, but I can’t help but wonder if it was because they were the only types of players he could afford… has-beens and have-nots.
You just don't know when to keep your mouth shut, do you Saxy boy?
He handcuffed the team's payroll by being worth nine wins a year by himself?
Based on the way the Rangers were spending the rest of the money, there’s pretty much no way they would’ve put the A-Rod $$$ to better use without him.
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 8, 2009 11:43 PM PST up reply actions
I think a better point
is that a signing like that for A-Rod is good…if your the Yankees or a team with a ridiculously vast payroll. Sure, with this contract A Rod is being UNDERpaid, if anything. However, if your the Rangers, and you hamstring yourself with said contract, then it really isn’t doing you any good. What’s the benefit to having a 10 WAR player is everyone else around you sucks? It’s not that A-Roids has hamstrung the team, it’s that the team needs to figure out how to be more “efficient” or basically how to underpay lots more players in order to gain more WAR/Dollar since their payroll is much more limited.
"I'm on hold for now"- Bobby Crosby
by DyeLongJustice on Feb 9, 2009 8:32 AM PST up reply actions
Texas payrolls during the A-Rod years
2001: $89m
2002: $106m
2003: $103m
They were not in any way hamstrung by the A-Rod contract.
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 9, 2009 9:02 AM PST up reply actions
I think what oc's saying here also alludes to
Tom Hicks’s reaction to the contract. He saw those W-L records during A-Rod’s stint and thought “Good god, I can’t spend any money on any other free agents!” He’s even said as much on the radio and in other local media in recent years.
Instead of saying, “Wow, I’m getting incredible value for money from my SS, and I just need my front office to do better player evaluations”, he freaked and said stuff in the media along the lines of “If the fans want me to spend money on the team, they need to show up at the games and make us more money.”
Well, Tom Hicks is silly then
But the A-Rod contract he pulled off was terrific.
by Jeff Sullivan on Feb 9, 2009 11:41 AM PST up reply actions
You're definitely right.
He’s even said that he was too involved in the day-to-day operations of the team during his first few years of ownership. I don’t think he understood that you need to trust your talent evaluators, and if their evaluations go awry, you need to fire them.
I think he understands that Daniels has done a much better job at evaluating amateur and free-agent talent, but it’s difficult to know for sure.
Looking at the numbers, it’s easy to see that the A-Rod contract was great, and the trade for Soriano was a joke, but it’s quite shocking to me that his value with the bat was so low while he was here, especially given Rudy Jaramillo’s reputation as a hitting coach. Nevertheless, he still wouldn’t have been A-Rod’s equal, and we haven’t seen squat from Joaquin Arias since his shoulder surgery.
How would they have better spent that money then?
by Graham MacAree on Feb 9, 2009 11:19 AM PST up reply actions
Considering that the Gonzalez/Rodriguez era was coming to an end and the farm system was in shambles, I would have liked to have seen what the Rangers would have done had they chosen Dombrowski as their GM.
John Hart was here for one year, and he went and gave out the most expensive contract ever made. Rodriguez signing with the Rangers was Tom Hicks way of going all in with his chips. Numbers justified, it was this bloated contract that led to a series of other bad contracts where the Rangers overspent on players who weren’t worth their money.
All of this is secondary to Jeff’s point however. A-Rod might have been worth his money, but I disagree that it’s ‘one of the moves that the Rangers got right.’
You just don't know when to keep your mouth shut, do you Saxy boy?
You can make the same argument that signing 5 players that are worth 2 WAR hamstrings a team
Because then they’re down 5 roster spots, and roster spots are sometimes just as valuable as cash.
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That, and it's always better to pay a lot of money for a superstar
and pick complementary players up off the scrap heap.
by JI on Feb 9, 2009 9:38 AM PST up reply actions
A-Rod gets the balme for the Rangers' sucking because they were a decent team before he signed there
and then they were awful after he arrived. Since people will more readily accept a simply explanation (one contract) than a complex explanation (a series of smaller contracts), they balme A-Rod.
This really appears to be it. People will accept a simpler explanation over a more complex explanation, almost regardless of their relative validity.
People are dumb.
I like using semi-colons; they make me feel smart.
I would actually argue that people were inclined to dislike A-Rod when he signed with the Rangers
and that everything he’s been blamed for since then is simply a justification.
by Aaron Campeau on Feb 9, 2009 12:34 PM PST up reply actions
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