What Mozeliak Knows

Q. How much is your best player worth to your team if he's hurt all season?

A. Not zero. That wouldn't be so bad. He's worth zero minus whatever you're paying him.

There, in a nutshell, may be the reason the St. Louis Cardinals prefer to have $300 million over the next 10 years than to have the best baseball player in the universe.

In a world where Alex Rodriguez can command $27.5 million/year and Derek Jeter can even extract $18 million/year, Albert Pujols should be able to wrangle a $30 million per diem. Jeter's OPS could fall asleep in the left pants pocket of Pujols' OPS without causing a bulge.

In his first 10 seasons, Prince Albert has added roughly 92 wins to his St. Louis teams. At nine wins a season, Pujols is worth roughly $45 million/year. Moreover, for a borderline playoff franchise like St. Louis, the eight or nine marginal wins positively swells with import. A .500 Cards team without Albert is a  90-win Central division champ with him, adding attendance during the season, revenue from playoff games, spiked merchandise purchases and similar future expenditures.

Yet Cardinal management reportedly offered $25 million for eight years, far below Albert's marginal value, assuming he continues his Superman imitation.

Should we dial up the local looney bin for GM John Mozeliak? Nah, hold the phone. 

When teams balk at inking their own stars, it's worth considering what they know. Mozeliak may be seeing something in Pujols that concerns him, perhaps on the training table. His star has suffered in the past with a balky back, something to be especially concerned about as he ages. 

Mozeliak may also know more about Albert's true chronology than the rest of the league. If his age is understated by a mere two years, Pujols hits age 40 in the seventh year of the deal. The odds of breaking down increase logarithmically in ordinary humans at about age 38.

There's another consideration that has little to do with the player himself. If Mozeliak is realistic about the current squad, he may conclude that his stars-and-scrubs franchise with limited resources won't be able to afford a decent supporting cast after betting the farm on one player. Even a winning bet hamstrings the franchise; a losing bet consigns St. Louis to 10 years of paying the vigorish and watching Houston pass in the standings.

Research shows that free agents re-signed by their incumbent team fare significantly better on average than those lured away. It's worth assuming that management of the home team has good reason for re-upping or bypassing the player in question.

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