Albert Pujols, who smacked the 600th home run of his Hall of Fame career this week, may be a pioneer in career decline.
You probably remember the sad declines of some great players. Mickey Mantle nearly unable to walk. Willie Mays a pathetic shadow of himself. Steve Carlton 6-15, 6.40 with as many walks as strikeouts.
But those guys hung on a year or two too long. They wanted to play. They didn't know anything else.
Pujols's performance has diminished seven of the last eight seasons. He became a below average player last year and has sunk to replacement level this year. By next season, his 18th, he will be unrosterable.
But he will be rostered. The Angels inked him to one of the worst contracts of all time, a 10-year, $240 million deal at age 31.
Pujols will have four more years of payments after this, untenable, season.
Why Keep Playing? 114 Million Reasons
There is no reason but money for Pujols to stay on. He will not reach homer number 700. He will suffer injury. He will lower his lifetime batting average, now just eight points clear of .300, and his OBP, which has fallen below .400.
If Prince Albert were to walk away at the conclusion of this campaign, he would leave $114 million on the table. That he's already cashed a Powerball ticket -- $230 million over his career -- does not make it any more palatable to turn down $114 million doing what you love, even if you never get out of the dugout.
It is possible, depending on whether the Angels simply pay him off and turn him into a roving ambassador, that Pujols will don the uniform for five full seasons while contributing negatively to Anaheim's pennant thrust.
That is an inner circle Hall of Fame decline. No one has quite done that.
Cabrera and Wright Too
But it may become the new norm, at least for a while. Miguel Cabrera has stumbled to below average offense so far this year. With six more years and $184 million guaranteed on his contract after 2017, he could also become a massive albatross in Detroit.
The Mets suffer the same ignominy with David Wright, who can't even get on the field. Including 2017, Wright has four seasons of guaranteed payment, worth $67 million to him. For $60 million from 2015-2017 he has offered the Mets a nice smile and three-tenths of a win.
Teams may have learned not to sign these ridiculous, backloaded contracts anymore. We saw what Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion had to settle for this winter.
For a few more years though, some former great players will limp up to the plate and flail fecklessly at fastballs simply because they are getting paid for past deeds.
News that Albert Pujols had passed Ted Williams, Frank Thomas, Willie McCovey, Jimmy Foxx and Mickey Mantle, on the all-time home run list, and is now bearing down on Mike Schmidt, got me thinking about posterity.
If Pujols can maintain the assault this year, 18 more home runs will leave him as the all-time 35-year-old home run leader.
Of course, what made Hank Aaron the home run king, or Barry Bonds, if you consider all of his 762 yard clearings to be legitimate, was their longevity at a high level. Hammerin' Hank popped 201 dingers after age 35, posting a productive year as late as age 40. Bonds smashed 268 in his geezerhood, including the record 73 at age 36. He, of course, remained productive on the field through his last at bat but was banished by a conspiracy among the lords of baseball for other reasons.
We can speculate about where Pujols might end up on the home run list by career's end, but the more pertinent question might be where his skills will be. They had obviously begun their retreat long before age 35 (in fact at age 31), delivering all of his four worst seasons on the new contract with the Angels. The decline has been steep: .331/.426/.624 before age 31; .279/.339/.498 since. Pujols has fallen from Willie Mays to Justin Upton.
What has to make that contract particularly nettlesome to the Angels' brass is that they backloaded it, so Albert will be collecting $30 million in his age 41 year, a full decade after he slipped off the hitting cliff. But because he's guaranteed that 30 extra large, it's nearly inconceivable that he'd retire before then, no matter the state of his skills.
It's not just Albert. Back-loaded contracts have been the free agent form the last few years, with analysts proclaiming that the only way to sign a free agent behemoth -- ARod, Robby Cano, Max Scherzer, etc. -- is to "eat" the final years of the deal.
(This has always struck me as a self-fulfilling prophesy. The more likely truth is that any team dumb enough to offer such an over-generous guarantee is, by definition, most likely to win the bidding war, Pyrrhic though that victory may be. But if everyone recognized how stillbirth the logic in the long-term, a winning bid could be made without any late-contract consumption.)
Will Alex Rodriguez finally, mercifully, hang up his spikes following his age 41 season before or after he needs a hip replacement? How much embarrassment will ARod and Albert (and Robby, etc.) heap upon themselves and their front offices in their final seasons when they're more likely to work a walker than a walk?
Certainly other great players ended their careers on down notes. But in almost every case they stowed their cleats immediately thereafter, without the temptation of a guaranteed $30 million opportunity cost. If Albert can hardly move at age 38, will he have the fortitude to leave $100 million on the table to save his dignity?
These are new questions necessitated by the goofy philosophy dominating free agent signings. The sad declines potentially facing Albert, ARod, Cano and others may bring the subject into sharp relief, but it's the offending GMs who will have to answer for the players' decrepitude.
Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don't. Almond Joy has nuts; Mounds don't.
Marlins owner Jeff Loria may not have nuts, but he's got balls, catapulting the Federal Reserve at high-profile free agents in order to get a stadium built on the public dime and then jettisoning his shiny new toys months later.
He isn't nuts though. Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle and Heath Bell, playing beside Hanley Ramirez, Josh Johnson and Giancarlo Stanton, delivered 93 losses last season. Plan B could hardly be worse.
If this is, in fact, Plan B. Miami backloaded the big money contracts with a dump truck, perhaps so future trade partners would endure the bulk of the burden. Buehrle signed for $6 million in '12 (a big pay cut) but $48 million over the next three years. Reyes gets $10 million each of his first two seasons (also a pay cut) and $22 million each of the last four. Bell also traded a small downgrade to $6 million in year one for $9 million in years two-through-four, a contract already $6 million too fat.
But that's a problem for another team. Bell is now the D-backs' albatross, with help from an $8 million Marlin subsidy. Meanwhile, Reyes and Buehrle, along with every Marlin asset not named Stanton, will henceforth toil in Ontario while Miami pursues its post-World Series formula of stocking up prospects and cashing in on the cheap.
Except that it doesn't appear Loria got much in the futures market from the Blue Jays, almost certainly because of the artificially high price of his asset bundle. Enjoy your gaudy new nuthouse, Miamiheads! No lines at the ticket windows!
The Blue Jays are a lot poorer right now, but they aren't nuts. GM Alex Anthopoulos, who managed last year to trade Vernon Wells's toxic contract and get a better player in return, is striking when the iron is hot. Yankee teeth are getting long, Boston is back-pedaling and Baltimore's fairy godmother is busy waving her wand at Notre Dame. The AL East is as ripe for the taking as it's ever been and Double-A is pouncing, cost-be-damned. He's getting help from the Loonie too: having once cowered in the greenback's shadow, the Canadian dollar now looks eye-to-eye at its devalued American cousin.
Even after shopping for stars at the Marlins Everything Must Go sale and inking the discount purchase of presumably unjuiced Melky Cabrera, the Jays have holes. Adding Johnson and Buehrle gives them just three good starters. An outfield of Jose Bautista, Colby Rasmus and Melky Cabrera could be sick, or if the latter two revert to previous form, could make Canadians sick. There are plenty of other issues, but plenty of time to purchase solutions.
We'll find out in 2013 whether the fishy Marlin strategy or the soaring Blue Jay formula pays dividends.
