Mega-Contracts
Cheers to Mets owner Fred Wilpon and GM Steve Phillips for publicly dropping out of the Alex Rodriguez sweepstakes. Phillips stated that they could not put one player that much ahead of the team. And if he means it, he makes sense.
Its a bad idea for any team to spend $15 to $20 million per season on one player. In saddling your franchise with a contract of that size, you are:
1. Paying one player almost twice as much as any other on your team, possibly creating animosity or too high expectations.
2. Spending most of your resource on one position. You can have Manny Ramirez with his .350 BA, 150-160 RBI's, and 45 home runs for $17-20 million per season. Or you can get Ellis Burks and his .300 BA, 95 RBI's, and 24 homers for $6-8 million, plus catcher Charles Johnson and his .296 average with 27 homers and 79 RBIs for 8-10 million.
3. Stuck with him. If you sign a free agent to a multi-year deal worth $15-20 million per season, know this: you will not be able to trade him. If you don't want to trade him, its because he's performing at the level that was expected. If you want to trade him, nobody will want him. On the other hand, if you sign Charles Johnson but later want to trade him, someone will want him, as evidenced by the number of different teams Johnson has played for.
4. Not hedging your bets. If Ellis Burks gets hurt, you've still got Charles Johnson. If Manny Ramirez gets hurt, you're lost. Cleveland should remember this point from the middle of this season.
Obviously, Johnson and Burks are still expensive players but the point of balance remains. You can't put all of your talent in one position on the field and still be able to compete.
Don't think that I am against players getting paid. Players should share in the profits that the owners are raking in. Just as ticket prices and television revenues keep increasing, so should player salaries. What I object to is allocating too much on one player.
I am in favor of a salary cap for baseball, but I'm also in favor of a salary floor. As it is now, I believe that the union is doing a disservice to most of its players. Many of the players are taking less money because the upper crust of players get the majority of the raises. One could argue that most players get raises when they are free agents, as long as their production is decent. But few players get percentage increases the size of what Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez could be seeing. Put in a salary cap/floor and the union could ensure that the total payroll remains high, but it would be more evenly distributed among the players.
