Ichiro the Asset

They wouldn’t give a flying rat’s ass about baseball, let alone pay at least $20, if Ichiro wasn’t on the team. There’s probably been a couple thousand average over the years. Say, 2000, x $20 × 81 home games. That’s $3.24 million a year, and I’d say that’s an absolute bare minimum. Add concessions, peak years, the Japanese TV deal…yeah.

The Mariners paid $13M in his posting fee and then $14M over the first 3 years in salary.

Contrary to a normal player who would have been paid about $1M over his first three seasons, Ichiro was paid ~$20M. Ichiro was worth ~$45M on the open market leaving the Mariners with an actual profit of about $25M (the black line). BUT! If Ichiro had come up through the minors, the Mariners would have ended up with a profit of ~$44M. Because the Mariners lacked normal team control, they had to pay an extra $19M to Ichiro.

So the purple line is (roughly) the black line minus the $19M that the team did not save via club control.

Pretty much the exact way I would’ve done it, aside from the posting fee. (I would’ve included it, as it was money the M’s spent for his services).

It does beg the question: When does Sabremetrics attempt to quantify and include super-WAR contributions in player evaluation? I’m sure we would all agree that certain players contribute revenue above and beyond what they do on the field, but that contribution is rarely addressed in typical player evaluations. Ichiro has certainly been worth a lot to the Mariners on the field, but how much has he contributed just because he’s Ichiro?

Hundreds of screaming Japanese girls. TV deal with Japan. Merchandise sales in Japan. The fact that we can lose so dependably but still make money in Japan is exactly why the ownership doesn’t care if we win or lose.

We could have 2+ Josh Hamiltons for the price of one Ichiro. And that fact that no other team in MLB would come close to paying Ichiro what we pay him ought to tell you that he’s not worth what we pay him. Ichiro was the first “star” player in my lifetime that this team has ever paid to keep, allowing us to be mostly a farm team for the rest of the majors. The second was Felix (I can’t recall any others). Ichiro is by far the highest paid player on the team, and there is no way you can build a contending team around him.

A fair measure of the investment would be dollar for dollar, not by player. For that, we could compare Ichiro’s value with the combined value of Hamilton, Napoli, and Nelson Cruz, whose combined salaries this year are about the same as Ichiro’s. I don’t have a chart generator for their numbers, but I can tell you that Texas was in the World Series last year and they’ll be in the playoffs next month.

I’d rather have power in right field than anything I suppose, but I’d take the endless rookie parade in the outfield, which costs nothing, and frees up roughly 21% of our payroll. Interestingly, USAToday says that Texas’ payroll is only 6 million higher than ours this year. Looks like they’re just a lot smarter with it.

I get sick of hearing a few biased people whining about Ichiro, and what he’s been paid.

They whine and attack by saying that Ichiro is getting more than Hamilton, etc. But fail to mention (and we know why) that the price of two Carlos Silvas or two Figgins, etc., was more than enough to buy you an Ichiro. And I know which one I would’ve rather have had.
 
If other signees had performed as well as Ichiro, or even somewhere close in terms of value and cost performance, the Mariners would have had much better success.