What can you get for $50 million?

by
October 2, 2011

Well, it depends. If you are the Tampa Bay Rays, you can get your complete 2011 roster paid for. If you are one of the two teams that they fought off in the Wild Card race—a bit less.

Now, as far as the Boston Red Sox go, one can cut them some slack. J.D. Drew is 35 years old and in the final year of his contract. He gave the Red Sox some good years, most notably 2008 and 2009. Daisuke Matsuzaka has definitely not lived up to the expectations, especially when one considers the posting fee. And both Mike Cameron and Carl Crawford took nose dives upon arriving to Fenway, but not too many people predicted such sharp declines.

And then, there are the Angels.

They spent north of the complete Rays budget on the worst catcher in the league (after running the best one out of town), a 34-year old reliever with a career walk rate of five, a guy who is so bad they’ve been paying him for two years not to play, a fastball starter so broken that he can’t crack 88 mph and the outfielder least likely to reach base in last 100 years. No, seriously, that’s not an exaggeration. This is what the Angels paid $18 million for:

Makes you wonder what instructional videos Cito Gaston was showing his superstars back in Toronto, doesn’t it?


Bojan Koprivica played soccer in the USA and baseball everywhere else. While some use this fact to question his competitiveness, he talks of it using expressions like "international flair".
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Devon Forrest Young
12 years ago

Apparently Cito was showing the team videos of his own plate appearances as examples of good batting.

I still can’t believe the Angels gave Wells so many PA

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Brad Johnson
12 years ago

Reagins probably had a lot to do with that, if Wells had been able to even post a strong final two weeks of the season and push them into the playoffs, then Reagins probably still has a job.

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MikeS
12 years ago

That’s not very impressive when compared to CHW group of Dunn, Rios, Pierre and Vizquel.  -4.5 WAR for about $40M.

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Bojan Koprivica
12 years ago

Hi Bryan,

The names to the right of the graph are color legends. They are in the same order as the bars in the main column, so Vernon Wells is the lightest part of it ($18 million) and Jeff Mathis the darkest (just over a million).

Cheers,
Bojan

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Bryan F
12 years ago

Not quite understanding your graph…  Looks like Vernon Wells is making slightly less that $5 million and Jeff Mathis is making $35 million.

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