So this week ESPN published an article written by Dan Szymborkski on their ‘Insider’ platform ranking MLB’s ‘biggest albatrosses‘.
Here’s the methodology:
To answer this question, I started out with the ZiPS projections and calculated the difference between the projected long-term performance and how much a team is projected to pay for that performance for every player in baseball, whether from a signed contract or from predicting arbitration-year salaries. That difference, known as surplus value, is expressed in wins rather than dollars; raw dollars can be misleading given that a dollar committed for 2030 and a dollar committed for 2016 are two very different things.
Szymborkski threw in a little personal judgement to fill the gaps between raw stats and the final rankings.
And, yes, Albert Pujols is the worst contract currently in baseball (according to this article). As you’ll see with a little back of the book math below, if judged by production versus what has already been paid… it’s actually a net positive for the Angels. And the Cardinals.
Anyway, Halo’s Heaven had this to say about El Hombre:
I was on a Coachella Valley radio station last week for an interview about the Angels, and I tried to push this fact into the listener’s brains: the Angels will be paying Pujols $30 million in 2021. Let that sink in. I’ll wait.
It’s seriously one of the craziest, but totally real, Angels-related sentences a fan can say out loud; when it leaves your lips you automatically think “no, that can’t be right”. But it’s right, he’s our Albert-tross, alright.
Granted, this particular ESPN article tries to spin production vs salary committed moving forward. So in that respect, it’s hard to feel real good about Pujols deal if you’re the Angels.
But if your thesis back in the winter of 2011 was that the Cardinals would derive more value from letting Pujols go – even if he was ALBERT PUJOLS for several more years – then you’ve been validated.
Big time.
This will be the 5th season without Pujols manning first base for the Cardinals. And while the Cardinals haven’t had a consistent starter the past 4 seasons, when you take the player with the most amount of starts each season, the drop off from Pujols to his replacements isn’t that stark:
- 2012 – Allen Craig 2.3 WAR
- 2013 – Allen Craig 2.1 WAR
- 2014 – Matt Adams 2.2 WAR
- 2015 – Mark Reynolds -0.6 WAR
That’s a total of 8.2 WAR points. Over the same period, Pujols has accumulated a 13.3 WAR. If we use the value of a WAR point as 7M (for argument’s sake), here’s what that looks like as a side by side comparison:
- Albert Pujols: 13.3 WAR x 7M = 93.1M (worth) vs 75M (paid)
- Cardinals 1B: 8.2 WAR x 7M = 57.4M (worth) vs 4.77M (paid)
While the Angels were in the positive with Pujols, the Cardinals got outright crazy value with what they’ve paid for production from 1B.
With Brandon Moss making 8.25M and Matt Adams making 1.65M in 2016, it’s tough to see a path to any sort of similar value for the Cardinals this year.
Still.
The 1B business in LA and STL these past 4 years has been good to great, if we’re just going by the data and stripping out emotion and future commitments.
These stats also put in perspective just how underpaid Pujols was in STL. He had an 8.5 (!) WAR season in 2003 for 900K. He was worth about 59.5M.
If you ever want to know why the Cardinals have been on an extended streak of winning seasons…
Photo: FOX Sports
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