Baseballhead:
Crappy Players Everywhere, Rejoice!

Michael Cox

Unlike the opening bell on Wall Street, the official start of the free agent free-for-all on Thursday hasn't yet triggered a flurry of signings. Most teams have been waiting for the other guy to blink -- in the wake of the Mike Piazza mega-deal, a bunch of teams waiting to see if that's the going rate before picking up any top-flight guys.

Those teams are stupid.

As it turns out, the Piazza signing wasn't the one to worry about. The signings that harbor bad things to come are those of Darren Lewis and Brian Bohanon. Both career scrubs, their deals just raised the bar for fifth starters and role-players everywhere.

Lewis is an outfielder with a career .327 on-base percentage and .323 slugging average. Granted, in 1998 he had a career peak (.352/.362...ooooh), but after nine seasons and at the age of 31, that should be all the more reason to let him go, not sign him. And how much are the BoSox paying for this painfully below-average offense? An average of $2.3M per year. But hey -- he's got speed and defense!

Tell that to the Royals.

Then we've got Bohanon, who the Rockies gleefully snapped up in a three-year, $9M deal. Whereas a case can be made that Lewis at least has a redeeming feature to his game, Bohanon is just bad. A career ERA of 4.72 is just a starting point. You can expect him to give up almost 4 walks per nine innings on the way to allowing a whopping 13 (that's thirteen) baserunners per game.

Of course, Bohanon too had a career year in 1998, partly courtesy of the pitcher's paradise they call Dodger Stadium. However, he's now moving to Coors Field, where pitchers' careers come to die. And the geniuses in Denver keep wondering why their pitchers go south (so to speak) when they don the green and purple (speaking of which, why would a team want to wear the colors of a bruise?).

There you have it: the first position player and first pitcher signed after the deadline, both below average, both earning over $2M per year. By the standards set in these deals, it could cost some hapless team $60M to field a team of ten Bohanons and fifteen Lewises, a roster which even at league minimum would cause me to almost swallow my tongue. So, if Lewis is worth $2.3M, how much would you pay for a David Segui? And what does Bohanon's deal mean for a Brett Tomko?

What does it all mean? One interpretation is that in order to pay top players, most teams will have to either let their bench go to seed or rely on kids fresh out of AAA, because now even below-average players are at a premium.

However, there's another, better way to interpret this: Once the big-budget squads get their fill of $2.5M number-9 hitters and $3M fifth starters, the rest of the teams in the majors will continue paying scrubs as usual. This would have the effect of making the likes of New York, LA and Boston "high-rent districts," where the same property costs more simply because of the neighborhood.

I'd like that.

Item: Mets GM Steve Phillips admits more than one extramarital affair, then steps down to get counseling. One can only wonder what Phillips may have actually been thinking about when he "forgot" that Bill Pulsipher had to clear waivers before he could be sent down to AAA, or when he "forgot" to trade Rey Ordonez. But did he have to announce multiple affairs to the world? Oh, yeah, I forgot, it's New York City we're talking about.

One tip for players and front office personnel in New York: stop going to Wade Boggs for lifestyle advice...

Item: The MLB/Nippon Professional Baseball series rolls on, to the absolute utter ignorance of most of America and the Web. Major League Baseball hasn't even updated their box scores past the first game -- I know the GMs are meeting right now, but the webmasters too? The Japanese papers have tons of coverage, I'm told, but the major dailies' web sites barely have news, much less sports.

And to top it all, the local Fox Sports Net outlet up here in Seattle has decided to run their usual Oregon State varsity volleyball and "Ultimate Fan League" knowledge-bowl. They couldn't even nudge an infomercial or two from late-late-night for night owls or those of us with VCRs. Instead, I play peek-a-boo with ESPN to try and catch highlights on SportsCenter without sitting through linebackers talking about "gutting it up for Sunday" or David Stern droning about "principles."

In 2000, I buy a plane ticket to Tokyo.

 

about the author

Michael Cox isn't sure, but thinks he might be able to get a $3M contract with the Red Sox by walking into the front office and "negotiating" with random personnel. Have Duquette's people get back to Michael's people at mc@strikethree.com.