Mega-Contracts: How Have They Panned Out?

PC Drunken Friar

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Sep 12, 2003
14,542
South Boston
Manny Ramirez's teams were almost always good, usually very good, with him playing the outfield and rarely DH-ing. Like almost every year he played more than half the games, his teams were finished in first or second place and won a ton of games.

Of course an individual player isn't directly responsible for his team's success, and his bat helped make up for some defensive issues.
But defensive stats (especially the ones that are a decade or two old) and player reputations are really not very revealing either. For example, for a lot of the years Manny was with the Red Sox, some of the stats didn't account for the impact of the LF wall correctly. They would ding the LF for not catching short fly balls that hit the wall, because they would have been outs in other parks, so it must be the LF's fault when a 320-foot pop fly hits 15 feet high off the wall.
I remember a year after the trade, somehow Jason Bay's defensive stats cratered as soon as he moved to Fenway, while Manny's improved as soon as he left Fenway. Then Bay's numbers bounced up again when he left Boston. Surely just a coincidence, as those defensive numbers were the best we had at the time, so that means they were correct, right?
And I think part of Manny's bad defensive rep came from some of his fielding mistakes being legendarily hilarious.
(This all was pretty much just an excuse to post this video):
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcewudvPjdM
By dWAR, this isn't the case.

Bay's previous 4 seasons before Boston-
-1.4
-.08
-1.7
-1.4

Sox-
0.1 (best of career)
-0.3

Post Sox-
-0.1
-0.7

Manny- Averaged
-.98 with Cleveland
-1.4 with Boston
-1.0 With LA (small sample).

I think he played LF at Fenway pretty well, all things considered and his rep was off from reality (and also dWAR is flawed).
 

saintnick912

GINO!
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Oct 30, 2004
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Wasn't sure whether to start a new thread or post here, seems relevant here. Looking for thoughts from people who know more.

It seems like there are more and more very long contracts being given out lately for stars. And some of these start to look like AAV-padding. This makes me surprised that the CBA doesn't regulate individual contracts beyond the first six years of team control.

Myself, I'd like to see two things, or know why I'm an idiot for suggesting them:

Contract Term
While the NBA model has been hijacked by stars who can and do demand trades mid-contract, I like the idea of a hard limit on years and an advantage for the incumbent teams. 4/5 or 5/6 years for new/existing team seems like a reasonable compromise between "everyone is an FA every year" and the current state. I like seeing players play a long time in one place, but I think the balance is off now.

Age/AAV
The tail ends of some of these long contracts seem "unlikely to be played" and are just gamesmanship with the luxury tax to spread a contract. The NHL has provisions on older players and I think something similar could be useful in baseball. Something like limits to one or two year deals beyond a certain age, and the current year salary counting instead of the AAV past a certain age are high level ideas (that may or may not be what hockey does?).

Curious if this will come up in future CBAs. Didn't include any football-like provisions because NFL contracts are often funny-money headline grabs and the less of that the better.
 

jon abbey

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Jul 15, 2005
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The A’s signed Eric Chavez for 6 years / $66 million in March 2004 and haven’t gone past that in going on 19 years. Pathetic.
That deal covered 2005-2010, Chavez’s last good year was 2005. OAK won 90 games just once in those six seasons, then 94 or more games 4 times in 8 seasons from 2012-2019.

It’s pretty easy to see why lower revenue clubs like OAK and TB trade their best players and almost never sign big deals, big deals end up being bad deals more often than not.