Long-term guaranteed contracts for human performers are bizarre. Notice that football does not have them. - well they didn't until Patrick Mahomes. Baseball did not have them either until free agency came about. Since the 1970s the length of contracts has grown ever longer. Now the price and durations are mind blowing. $300 million. $400 million. $500 million. Almost all of these huge contracts will fail to deliver. So why are they being offered? That is a great question. Why are there any teams offering guaranteed contracts longer than 3 years for athletes who are susceptible to injury and performance degradation?
Observe that the NBA has the same problem. Massive amounts of money are being spent on contracts and there does not seem to be any correlation between the contracts and team performance and team success.
With so much money sloshing around the sports media industry, I understand owners having the option of offering insane contracts - of paying"monopoly money" to players. It appears to be the case that offering insane contracts is similar to owning mega million dollar yachts. What matters to the billionaire class is they can do it. not that they actually benefit from it.
Supply and demand. There are, by definition, only a very few players at the very top of the game. Every team wants them. A three-year deal may objectively make the most sense. But some team desperate for a championship will risk a fourth year, and some big-spending team will decide it can afford a fifth, and the player of course knows they are always just one injury away from having their career end at age 30, so they will go for the greatest security.
How well would you be motivated to perform at your job if you were guaranteed the same pay regardless of performance and results? These type of contracts assume that all players are totally self motivated, which as we have seen, is actually seldom the case.
Guaranteed contracts go both ways. If the player improves or the market goes up, the team still has them locked down at a bargain. There are plenty of examples of those, but they don’t make the headlines the same way a bad contract does.
Historically, if a player outperforms a contract they complain and make life miserable for the team and get traded, or the contract renegotiated. These days, most long contracts provide player options and opt outs. The player is given all the leverage.
The Orioles have done several long term contracts the past 20 years. Some have worked out well for both player and team. Others have been awful. The last two, for Ubaldo Jiminez and Chris Davis, were atrocious deals. Well, good deals for the players. Bad for the team.
I thought from the title that this would be a philosophical discussion on the term bad contract - if it's bad for the team but good for the player, why do fans call it bad (and vice versa). Whose side are we on anyway! (Oh right, it's always the team).
Anyway, as a Padres fan, of course we want to win it all (or just beat the Dodgers) but it's pretty hard not to romanticize a number of years with those three guys in the lineup (particularly the two young'uns) and just be happy with the pay off already.
So Heyward's 7th-inning rain delay speech justifies that massive contract, but Pete Rose's contributions to the 1980 Phillies are swept away because the man is an absolute creep? Oh, right, that solid WAR over Heyward's prime...
You get my point, Joe, and it's pathetic that I'm even trying to make it. 😄
Rose's contribution to the 1980 Phillies were a 94 OPS+ and a negative 2 dWAR. And, on the side a little gambling on baseball, lying and statutory rape. I'm not sure that anyone gets your point. Working Pete Rose into this thread, about contracts, is pretty weird.
I'm pretty weird. It was a joke at my own expense following Joe's recent piece on Rose's latest stop on his Neverending Atrocity Tour and my nuanced comments in response to that piece.
First, the ending question: Would owners pay a bad contract if it assured them a World Series win. Yes, most of them would. I would cynically question the importance of the speech. These things have a tendency to become legend if everything works out right afterwards, and to be forgotten if it doesn't. It doesn't mean the forgotten speech was worse, and it may have even been better. There are numerous people around the Royals who say that a speech Raul Ibanez (who finished his career by hitting 188/.278/.325 for the 2014 Royals and was left off the post season roster) made in late July or early August of 2014 was the thing that led to their e tow World Series runs. Poppycock, however great the speech was.
2nd: Speaking of the Royals, the Heyward contract was a direct result of the success of the Royals. The Royals went to the previous 2 World Series and won one largely from having great defense and an historically great bullpen. (Also a team philosophy of taking an old fashioned two strike approach, which was pretty much ignored by everyone except the Astros) So for a short time, Defense, which had been undervalued, became overvalued. (This short trend was blown away by the launch angle revolution) It was the perfect storm for Heyward. There was also a trend where people tried to "copy" the Royals bullpen, to line up three studs and shorten the game. (The Yankees, in particular tried this. No one had that kind of success. That was a perfect storm as well, partially driven by Wade Davis having the two best back to back years by a reliever in the history of the game.)
3rd) I do disagree that Trout's contract will be bad if they don't win. That really means the OTHER stuff they did was bad. I think there are plenty of good free agent contracts in the MLB, though most of those are for lesser money and not big splashes. There are even more extensions within the same team that work out. I think we need to look at these on more of a case by case basis instead of maligning the contract because it may have been one of the few things the team did correctly.
There's a huge difference between a bad contract given by an otherwise well-run team versus one given by a poorly-run club.
That's what a lot of these "What Ifs?" come down to.
Someone in the comments mentioned the Chris Sale contract — it's easy to look at that and say, "Oh, well the Red Sox could have given that money to so-and-so who would have been a more productive player." Probably! Boston has a track record of acquiring good players and building good teams that contend for championships.
But Mike Trout or Joey Votto? The Angels and Reds have been pretty lousy for a while now. The Angels in particular have a history of giving out big contracts to players who have not been good for them. To act like the Trout or Votto contracts are "bad" because they're preventing the Angels and Reds from paying players who would be better value for the team and lead to more wins seems silly considering there's no evidence to suggest that's what those teams would be doing. If the Angels weren't paying Trout, it's more likely they'd have given out another Rendon-type contract.
I think Joe actually asked this question in another article he wrote this year. Is the only point of a professional sports team to win it all? Or are their other things that matter. From the perspective of "winning is the only thing that matters," signing Trout to that contract and not winning anything is a waste I guess. But if they had just let him go then all those Angels fans wouldn't have had Mike Trout on their team for years and years. The entertainment value that having one of those guys on your team provides has to be worth something? I say this as a Royals fan who has gone my entire life without a real superstar to watch on a daily basis.
People misuse those Fangraphs dollar stats every day. Reminder: the dollar value quoted is the dollar amount it would take to replace that player's output in the free agent market. It's not an assessment of their contract. This is particularly important re: contract length. The longer the contract, the less the player should receive "in theory." I wish Fangraphs never published those numbers.
Other reminder: the value of an additional win varies by where the team is on the "win curve," because a team in competition gets a bigger payout per additional win. Heyward was worth more to the Cubs than to other teams because of their position. A non-contending team would never offer those dollars to him. So you need to change the Fangraphs number accordingly.
I agree with you about a win being more important to a contending team, but disagree with the idea that a non contending team would give a deal like this. I have watched it happen many times over the years. It has more to do with budget than contention. A team with a bigger budget can throw out a contract like this, because it doesn't kill the team even it fails. If a smaller budget team makes a deal like this, even if they are contending, they are don't have the margins to make up for it later, and if the player is not tradeable, they are stuck.
The Dodgers for instance, became one of the better teams in baseball when their ability to spend skyrocketed. There were bad deals, but they didn't matter. I think they are a well run team, but the money makes the difference. It allows them to make big mistakes, but they are able to make other big moves and some of them hit.
It is really too bad the MLB can't pool their money like the other major sports. When a football team is continually good or bad, I know it is on the owner and management (and coaching, hired by those guys) that they are that way, because they are all playing in the same sandbox with the same rules and salary structure. In baseball, you can't always tell.
Tactically a deal can be great while it strategically fails. The Joey Votto deal has been a tactical masterpiece: he's played brilliantly, and been worth every penny. But the team has strategically failed to build a team around him.
The Guardians today have Jose Ramirez (and they signed him to an absurdly team friendly contract). Tactically it's a masterpiece: strategically I fear it will flop. Why? Because the team appears uniquely uninterested in actually...winning in the postseason. They seem to only care about increasing their $/WAR ratio. It's rather frustrating.
Uninterested in winning in the playoffs and uniquely too... "frustrating" so I guess you're a fan but what's that based on? Maybe just an expression of frustration at being so close but yet so far? Much better than when they were losing 90-100 games annually. That wasn't much fun but it does color my perception.
This organization has traded every Cy Young winner it ever produced besides Shane Bieber (who WILL be traded before he leaves). This organization looked at the team (at the time a game out of first), with several big wholes in it, and just shrugged its shoulders "good enough!" they seem to think.
If they prioritized winning they wouldn't have stood pat in the offseason and the midseason.
If your view is "well we're better than when we were rebuilding" then I would retort: that doesn't take much effort. This team has Jose in his prime and maybe the last year Tito is a manager. Standing pat is foolish.
In the offseason they could've traded a young veteran like Gimenez or Clase or a prospect like Kwan. At midseason, they could've traded other prospects who turn out to be them - and for whom exactly that moved? They have chosen to go with youth and signing them to extensions like in the 90's -hopefully close to that success. I would've liked them to make a successful trade but "doing something" is no guarantee of even improving.
BTW, I'm old. I go farther back than rebuilding. I remember hoping they stayed in Cleveland. I just like watching good baseball especially this year's fun team currently in first place. I'm not a WS winner or bust guy.
Keep rooting and let's hope they make us both happy.
We're getting into a deep philosophical conversation about values and what matters to one person or entity versus another.
Joe and Mike talked about the Poscast recently about how Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper paid $40 million for the former summer house of Jon Corzine, the Goldman Sachs CEO who once passed Tepper over for a promotion, from Corzine's ex-wife just so that he could tear the house down.
Putting aside for a moment that this behavior is sociopathic, was it worth it to him?
It's Tepper's money and he moved forward with the teardown followed by building a new mansion.
So ... it sounds like it was ... yes?
Taking this back to baseball, while I can appreciate that we can put fixed dollar amounts on the price of WAR, that doesn't mean that winning a single World Series is worth the same to the 2016 Cubs as it would be to the 2022 Yankees, for instance, or the 2022 Cubs who are making the decision to part with Heyward.
And I say "the 2016 Cubs" — what does that even mean? Ownership? Epstein? The players? The fans? If the players or fans, *which* players or fans? We couldn't assume that everyone agrees.
It's unsatisfying to say, "Some of the people involved would say it's worth it and some would say it wasn't," but that's probably where we inevitably land because this stuff isn't monolithic.
Joe, speak to us of Gil Meche's contract. I remember people howling that it was an overpay at $55M, but then also reading that the Royals where in a position at that time where they HAD to overpay to convince players to play for them. Is there a crappy team premium?
And then (per FanGraphs) he outperformed the contract! But ONLY because he retired a year early – giving up $12M rather than going through the motions of rehabbing a shoulder that would never be fixed. He seems also to have been a good mentor for Grienke, so there are those intangibles again.
Maybe in baseball we need to talk more about a set of contracts and less about individual contracts, even though there isn’t the salary cap and I completely lack sympathy for team owners who want to cry poor on their payrolls.
I think “portfolio management” of contracts over time is more important because: (1) of course, as Joe points out, one star baseball player can’t move the needle like stars in basketball and football, (2) *everything* is guaranteed unlike in football (for the most part$ and (3) teams have so many more positions to fill than in basketball.
This also fits with how often teams want to package players together in trades to resolve bad contracts while also sending away good contracts. It is a portfolio.
Playing this out re those Cubs: over the 2014-15 and 15-16 offseasons, they signed a total of $482m in FA contracts, for 31 player-years. Lester, Lackey, Zobrist, and Fowler were the other big names. In that 2016 season, the collection of signees produced 18.9 WAR. (I’m not going to take on the project of figuring out the full WAR of all of the contracts.). 16 fewer wins would have taken them from easily the best record in baseball to missing the playoffs. So, you could look at it as that’s what they got, plus an option on a collection of another 20-ish player-years. I don’t know if reframing it that way actually helps, but it seems like an interesting thought exercise. So: this team has x positions it isn’t getting much out of and has a baseline projection of y wins for the rest of the team--how much is it worth to fill those and raise the projection to championship caliber. This also works with sending prospects for players and contracts.
A lesson could be that if you are going to spend big, spend big all at once when you already have a solid team. Which leads to the terribly innovative strategy of building a salary-controlled core and then using FA to get over the top. MLB could use more teams trying to get over the top these days.
On the other hand, the Angels have been very, very bad at portfolio management and timing their spend.
Arguing that the Mike Trout contract was a bad one because the Angels didn't win much of consequence during that time period is...I guess a take someone can have, but it feels like an extreme stretch to me. The issue for the Angels (as it has always been) isn't the Trout contract, it's the Pujols contract, the Hamilton contract, the Wilson contract, the Rendon contract, and on and on.
As a Cubs fan, I have certainly considered if Heywards contract was worth it. Certainly without the 2016 ws, it would not be. But what is a World Series worth? For me, there is no cost too high, well maybe a sexual assaulter is too far, but other than that no cost is too high for. I knew this would happen sometime, I just didn’t know the cost to the cubs, but its definitely time to rip the bandaid off. And send him packing. Kick rocks!
Buy.
Long-term guaranteed contracts for human performers are bizarre. Notice that football does not have them. - well they didn't until Patrick Mahomes. Baseball did not have them either until free agency came about. Since the 1970s the length of contracts has grown ever longer. Now the price and durations are mind blowing. $300 million. $400 million. $500 million. Almost all of these huge contracts will fail to deliver. So why are they being offered? That is a great question. Why are there any teams offering guaranteed contracts longer than 3 years for athletes who are susceptible to injury and performance degradation?
Observe that the NBA has the same problem. Massive amounts of money are being spent on contracts and there does not seem to be any correlation between the contracts and team performance and team success.
With so much money sloshing around the sports media industry, I understand owners having the option of offering insane contracts - of paying"monopoly money" to players. It appears to be the case that offering insane contracts is similar to owning mega million dollar yachts. What matters to the billionaire class is they can do it. not that they actually benefit from it.
Supply and demand. There are, by definition, only a very few players at the very top of the game. Every team wants them. A three-year deal may objectively make the most sense. But some team desperate for a championship will risk a fourth year, and some big-spending team will decide it can afford a fifth, and the player of course knows they are always just one injury away from having their career end at age 30, so they will go for the greatest security.
How well would you be motivated to perform at your job if you were guaranteed the same pay regardless of performance and results? These type of contracts assume that all players are totally self motivated, which as we have seen, is actually seldom the case.
Guaranteed contracts go both ways. If the player improves or the market goes up, the team still has them locked down at a bargain. There are plenty of examples of those, but they don’t make the headlines the same way a bad contract does.
Historically, if a player outperforms a contract they complain and make life miserable for the team and get traded, or the contract renegotiated. These days, most long contracts provide player options and opt outs. The player is given all the leverage.
The Orioles have done several long term contracts the past 20 years. Some have worked out well for both player and team. Others have been awful. The last two, for Ubaldo Jiminez and Chris Davis, were atrocious deals. Well, good deals for the players. Bad for the team.
I thought from the title that this would be a philosophical discussion on the term bad contract - if it's bad for the team but good for the player, why do fans call it bad (and vice versa). Whose side are we on anyway! (Oh right, it's always the team).
Anyway, as a Padres fan, of course we want to win it all (or just beat the Dodgers) but it's pretty hard not to romanticize a number of years with those three guys in the lineup (particularly the two young'uns) and just be happy with the pay off already.
So Heyward's 7th-inning rain delay speech justifies that massive contract, but Pete Rose's contributions to the 1980 Phillies are swept away because the man is an absolute creep? Oh, right, that solid WAR over Heyward's prime...
You get my point, Joe, and it's pathetic that I'm even trying to make it. 😄
Rose's contribution to the 1980 Phillies were a 94 OPS+ and a negative 2 dWAR. And, on the side a little gambling on baseball, lying and statutory rape. I'm not sure that anyone gets your point. Working Pete Rose into this thread, about contracts, is pretty weird.
I'm pretty weird. It was a joke at my own expense following Joe's recent piece on Rose's latest stop on his Neverending Atrocity Tour and my nuanced comments in response to that piece.
First, the ending question: Would owners pay a bad contract if it assured them a World Series win. Yes, most of them would. I would cynically question the importance of the speech. These things have a tendency to become legend if everything works out right afterwards, and to be forgotten if it doesn't. It doesn't mean the forgotten speech was worse, and it may have even been better. There are numerous people around the Royals who say that a speech Raul Ibanez (who finished his career by hitting 188/.278/.325 for the 2014 Royals and was left off the post season roster) made in late July or early August of 2014 was the thing that led to their e tow World Series runs. Poppycock, however great the speech was.
2nd: Speaking of the Royals, the Heyward contract was a direct result of the success of the Royals. The Royals went to the previous 2 World Series and won one largely from having great defense and an historically great bullpen. (Also a team philosophy of taking an old fashioned two strike approach, which was pretty much ignored by everyone except the Astros) So for a short time, Defense, which had been undervalued, became overvalued. (This short trend was blown away by the launch angle revolution) It was the perfect storm for Heyward. There was also a trend where people tried to "copy" the Royals bullpen, to line up three studs and shorten the game. (The Yankees, in particular tried this. No one had that kind of success. That was a perfect storm as well, partially driven by Wade Davis having the two best back to back years by a reliever in the history of the game.)
3rd) I do disagree that Trout's contract will be bad if they don't win. That really means the OTHER stuff they did was bad. I think there are plenty of good free agent contracts in the MLB, though most of those are for lesser money and not big splashes. There are even more extensions within the same team that work out. I think we need to look at these on more of a case by case basis instead of maligning the contract because it may have been one of the few things the team did correctly.
There's a huge difference between a bad contract given by an otherwise well-run team versus one given by a poorly-run club.
That's what a lot of these "What Ifs?" come down to.
Someone in the comments mentioned the Chris Sale contract — it's easy to look at that and say, "Oh, well the Red Sox could have given that money to so-and-so who would have been a more productive player." Probably! Boston has a track record of acquiring good players and building good teams that contend for championships.
But Mike Trout or Joey Votto? The Angels and Reds have been pretty lousy for a while now. The Angels in particular have a history of giving out big contracts to players who have not been good for them. To act like the Trout or Votto contracts are "bad" because they're preventing the Angels and Reds from paying players who would be better value for the team and lead to more wins seems silly considering there's no evidence to suggest that's what those teams would be doing. If the Angels weren't paying Trout, it's more likely they'd have given out another Rendon-type contract.
I think Joe actually asked this question in another article he wrote this year. Is the only point of a professional sports team to win it all? Or are their other things that matter. From the perspective of "winning is the only thing that matters," signing Trout to that contract and not winning anything is a waste I guess. But if they had just let him go then all those Angels fans wouldn't have had Mike Trout on their team for years and years. The entertainment value that having one of those guys on your team provides has to be worth something? I say this as a Royals fan who has gone my entire life without a real superstar to watch on a daily basis.
People misuse those Fangraphs dollar stats every day. Reminder: the dollar value quoted is the dollar amount it would take to replace that player's output in the free agent market. It's not an assessment of their contract. This is particularly important re: contract length. The longer the contract, the less the player should receive "in theory." I wish Fangraphs never published those numbers.
Other reminder: the value of an additional win varies by where the team is on the "win curve," because a team in competition gets a bigger payout per additional win. Heyward was worth more to the Cubs than to other teams because of their position. A non-contending team would never offer those dollars to him. So you need to change the Fangraphs number accordingly.
I agree with you about a win being more important to a contending team, but disagree with the idea that a non contending team would give a deal like this. I have watched it happen many times over the years. It has more to do with budget than contention. A team with a bigger budget can throw out a contract like this, because it doesn't kill the team even it fails. If a smaller budget team makes a deal like this, even if they are contending, they are don't have the margins to make up for it later, and if the player is not tradeable, they are stuck.
The Dodgers for instance, became one of the better teams in baseball when their ability to spend skyrocketed. There were bad deals, but they didn't matter. I think they are a well run team, but the money makes the difference. It allows them to make big mistakes, but they are able to make other big moves and some of them hit.
It is really too bad the MLB can't pool their money like the other major sports. When a football team is continually good or bad, I know it is on the owner and management (and coaching, hired by those guys) that they are that way, because they are all playing in the same sandbox with the same rules and salary structure. In baseball, you can't always tell.
Tactically a deal can be great while it strategically fails. The Joey Votto deal has been a tactical masterpiece: he's played brilliantly, and been worth every penny. But the team has strategically failed to build a team around him.
The Guardians today have Jose Ramirez (and they signed him to an absurdly team friendly contract). Tactically it's a masterpiece: strategically I fear it will flop. Why? Because the team appears uniquely uninterested in actually...winning in the postseason. They seem to only care about increasing their $/WAR ratio. It's rather frustrating.
But this is certainly part of the analysis.
Uninterested in winning in the playoffs and uniquely too... "frustrating" so I guess you're a fan but what's that based on? Maybe just an expression of frustration at being so close but yet so far? Much better than when they were losing 90-100 games annually. That wasn't much fun but it does color my perception.
This organization has traded every Cy Young winner it ever produced besides Shane Bieber (who WILL be traded before he leaves). This organization looked at the team (at the time a game out of first), with several big wholes in it, and just shrugged its shoulders "good enough!" they seem to think.
If they prioritized winning they wouldn't have stood pat in the offseason and the midseason.
If your view is "well we're better than when we were rebuilding" then I would retort: that doesn't take much effort. This team has Jose in his prime and maybe the last year Tito is a manager. Standing pat is foolish.
In the offseason they could've traded a young veteran like Gimenez or Clase or a prospect like Kwan. At midseason, they could've traded other prospects who turn out to be them - and for whom exactly that moved? They have chosen to go with youth and signing them to extensions like in the 90's -hopefully close to that success. I would've liked them to make a successful trade but "doing something" is no guarantee of even improving.
BTW, I'm old. I go farther back than rebuilding. I remember hoping they stayed in Cleveland. I just like watching good baseball especially this year's fun team currently in first place. I'm not a WS winner or bust guy.
Keep rooting and let's hope they make us both happy.
I have no hope or expectations this team goes far
And they’re not extending all their young players. They signed Jose and Straw. That’s hardly a ‘90s extension resurgence
and Clase and it's only one offseason. Dangling millions of dollars in front of an unproven kid can prove tempting.
I have high hopes but I always do.
and Clase and it's only one offseason. Dangling millions of dollars in front of an unproven kid can prove tempting.
I have high hopes but I always do.
Maybe the team will be ready to spend money and prioritize the present in 2025. If all goes according to plan...
Hmmm... This sort of crazy talk will soon have you reevaluating what it means to be an MVP.
My thought exactly.
We're getting into a deep philosophical conversation about values and what matters to one person or entity versus another.
Joe and Mike talked about the Poscast recently about how Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper paid $40 million for the former summer house of Jon Corzine, the Goldman Sachs CEO who once passed Tepper over for a promotion, from Corzine's ex-wife just so that he could tear the house down.
Putting aside for a moment that this behavior is sociopathic, was it worth it to him?
It's Tepper's money and he moved forward with the teardown followed by building a new mansion.
So ... it sounds like it was ... yes?
Taking this back to baseball, while I can appreciate that we can put fixed dollar amounts on the price of WAR, that doesn't mean that winning a single World Series is worth the same to the 2016 Cubs as it would be to the 2022 Yankees, for instance, or the 2022 Cubs who are making the decision to part with Heyward.
And I say "the 2016 Cubs" — what does that even mean? Ownership? Epstein? The players? The fans? If the players or fans, *which* players or fans? We couldn't assume that everyone agrees.
It's unsatisfying to say, "Some of the people involved would say it's worth it and some would say it wasn't," but that's probably where we inevitably land because this stuff isn't monolithic.
Hard for this Red Sox fan to read this article today. It's pretty damn clear that Chris Sale's contract was absolutely a bad one.
If only there had been an ooof clause that said you can’t punch walls or ride a bike down hill.
Think Sale needs a full time minder/driver
Joe, speak to us of Gil Meche's contract. I remember people howling that it was an overpay at $55M, but then also reading that the Royals where in a position at that time where they HAD to overpay to convince players to play for them. Is there a crappy team premium?
And then (per FanGraphs) he outperformed the contract! But ONLY because he retired a year early – giving up $12M rather than going through the motions of rehabbing a shoulder that would never be fixed. He seems also to have been a good mentor for Grienke, so there are those intangibles again.
Good contract? Bad contract?
Maybe in baseball we need to talk more about a set of contracts and less about individual contracts, even though there isn’t the salary cap and I completely lack sympathy for team owners who want to cry poor on their payrolls.
I think “portfolio management” of contracts over time is more important because: (1) of course, as Joe points out, one star baseball player can’t move the needle like stars in basketball and football, (2) *everything* is guaranteed unlike in football (for the most part$ and (3) teams have so many more positions to fill than in basketball.
This also fits with how often teams want to package players together in trades to resolve bad contracts while also sending away good contracts. It is a portfolio.
Playing this out re those Cubs: over the 2014-15 and 15-16 offseasons, they signed a total of $482m in FA contracts, for 31 player-years. Lester, Lackey, Zobrist, and Fowler were the other big names. In that 2016 season, the collection of signees produced 18.9 WAR. (I’m not going to take on the project of figuring out the full WAR of all of the contracts.). 16 fewer wins would have taken them from easily the best record in baseball to missing the playoffs. So, you could look at it as that’s what they got, plus an option on a collection of another 20-ish player-years. I don’t know if reframing it that way actually helps, but it seems like an interesting thought exercise. So: this team has x positions it isn’t getting much out of and has a baseline projection of y wins for the rest of the team--how much is it worth to fill those and raise the projection to championship caliber. This also works with sending prospects for players and contracts.
A lesson could be that if you are going to spend big, spend big all at once when you already have a solid team. Which leads to the terribly innovative strategy of building a salary-controlled core and then using FA to get over the top. MLB could use more teams trying to get over the top these days.
On the other hand, the Angels have been very, very bad at portfolio management and timing their spend.
Arguing that the Mike Trout contract was a bad one because the Angels didn't win much of consequence during that time period is...I guess a take someone can have, but it feels like an extreme stretch to me. The issue for the Angels (as it has always been) isn't the Trout contract, it's the Pujols contract, the Hamilton contract, the Wilson contract, the Rendon contract, and on and on.
As a Cubs fan, I have certainly considered if Heywards contract was worth it. Certainly without the 2016 ws, it would not be. But what is a World Series worth? For me, there is no cost too high, well maybe a sexual assaulter is too far, but other than that no cost is too high for. I knew this would happen sometime, I just didn’t know the cost to the cubs, but its definitely time to rip the bandaid off. And send him packing. Kick rocks!