Making sense of baseball dollars

With the Winter Meetings going at full tilt this week it means that for all I know while writing this the Mets on Tuesday night signed Ben Zobrist, Geraldo Parra, and a kick-butt reliever to be named later while simultaneously being deep in trade talks for a legitimate shortstop.  So if it looks like this article is not talking about the hot Mets news of the day that is why.

It is already a given that sports dollars earned by the top echelon of athletes are almost incomprehensible to us of the ordinary variety of human.  But still in this bizarro world there are a plethora of crazy numbers.

You might think we are talking about Zack Greinke getting a contract of $206 million to pitch for the next six years for the Arizona Diamondbacks.  Greinke has started 154 games the past six years.  Even if he pitches this many or even averages 30 starts a year for the next six years we are seeing that he will make more than $1 million per start.

But this must not be all that crazy in that the Dodgers and Giants were ready to give him more than $1 million per start but when he wanted a sixth year they both said, “Enjoy the desert”, and begged off.

No really the screwiest deal we have seen handed out is the one to our old buddy Mike Pelfrey.  Remember him?

You probably can recall how he went from being a promising pitcher to a marginal pitcher to a bad pitcher and after 2011 an ex-Met.  Most of us said good riddance at the time.

Here’s what his last couple of seasons have looked like statistically:

Year   Age  Tm Lg W  L W-L%  ERA  G GS GF CG SHO SV    IP   H  R ER HR BB IBB  SO HBP BK WP  BF ERA+  FIP  WHIP

2013    29 MIN AL 5 13 .278 5.19 29 29  0  0   0  0 152.2 184 92 88 13 53   0 101   6  0  1 680   79 3.99 1.552

2014    30 MIN AL 0  3 .000 7.99  5  5  0  0   0  0  23.2  29 23 21  5 18   0  10   2  0  1 119   50 7.57 1.986

2015    31 MIN AL 6 11 .353 4.26 30 30  0  0   0  0 164.2 198 86 78 11 45   1  86  12  0  5 714   97 4.00 1.476

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 12/9/2015.

There’s a lot of nasty stuff in those numbers but we have highlited the innings pitched and hits allowed.  The WHIP (hits + walks divided by innings pitched) is also quite brutal.

The Tigers recently gave Pelfrey a two year deal for $16 million.  That strikes me as nuts.   It makes the 2-1/2 mill the Mets will be paying Ruben Tejada look almost reasonable.

Perhaps the positive ramifications for the Mets would be that some teams could look at the contract that Pelfrey just got and realize that for a moderately decent prospect or position player they could obtain Jonathon Niese.  Niese is nobody’s idea of a great pitcher but he is one heck of a lot better than Mike Pelfrey is or ever was.  His contract is for $9 million in 2016 and then some team options kick in with relatively low buy outs.

When we go to the ballpark and see that the same beer we can buy for less than $2 at the supermarket sells for $8 to $12 at the stadium there is sticker shock.  It would seem that the same kind of sticker shock must hit the Mets’ front office when they see the kind of contracts Ben Zobrist, Daniel Murphy, and Joakim Soria (3 years $25 million to the champion KC Royals) all get.  And then there’s the one signed by Mike Pelfrey.