Yahoo!:"Outfielder Torii Hunter and the Los Angeles Angels reached a preliminary agreement Wednesday night on a five-year contract thought to be worth at least $80 million."Quick math: eighty divided by five is sixteen. At least sixteen.
This is incredible. You know what happened exactly one year ago? Something quite similar.
"With Guerrero in right and Garret Anderson in left, the move leaves no space in the starting outfield for Gary Matthews Jr. The Angels said the center fielder, who signed a $50 million, five-year deal as a free agent last offseason, could see time at designated hitter and spell the corner outfielders."Loosely translated: "The Angels overpaid for a CF with an overrated glove who was coming off of a career year 365 days ago, and have now decided to do the same exact thing. This poses a problem, as they now have two players that fit the exact same description. To 'fix' this, they are going to be paying $9MM for the privilege of having a guy with a 96 career OPS+ (93 last year) split time between LF, RF, and DH."
Hunter's career OBP is .324, and his career OPS+ is 104. He'll be 33 in July. He looks good out there, but by any metric Hunter was an average fielder this year; THT has him at 0, BP at -1. Only the leaders and trailers have been published from Dewan's system, but he's in neither, which means he was between +3 and -9.
It looks as though Hunter is an overrated fielder coming off a career year at the age of 32. This seems like a pretty solid formula for someone to get more money than they're worth, does it not?
I suppose the Angels have a lot of money to spend. But this really seems like a terrible contract. Hunter hit .271/.329/.476 (109 OPS+) over his age 27-31 seasons; it would be unreasonable to expect him to maintain that level in his age 32-36 seasons. If we're being generous, we have a slightly above average hitter with an average glove. There's some value in that, since he plays CF. But $16MM a year? That seems like an awful lot.
Update: Apparently it's $18MM/year. Wow.
2 comments:
Good god, much like last year's hotstove league left A.J. Burnett as a bargain and Doc as an absolute steal the Jays deal with Vernon Wells now seems quite reasonable. $18M for a Gold Glove center fielder who usually hits .300 with 30+ HR and 100+ RBI versus Torii Hunter. I like my team's guy thank you very much.
and what of reggie willits? not that he should get a starting spot in this rediculously expensive outfield but he's still a quality player. good avg, no power, loads of speed, avg defender. i mean right now he's pretty much the definition of avg, minus power. but i think he'll get better, prolly slump in '08, but overall i think he'll be an above avg player. anyway, i smell a trade. perhaps for a shortstop, unless aybar is some kinda prospect, i'm a little behind on prospects for the moment. but anyway there is like eckstein at best on the market. trade for someone with 2 yrs left and let brandon wood develop, him i've heard of, though i'm not convinced he's a ss, for lack of information mostly, but also he's mostly listed as a 3b.
Post a Comment