Last week, the former Boston Red Sox pitching star Jon Lester, who had been traded to Oakland in the latter part of the 2014 season, rejected a $135 million, six-year contract offer to return to Boston, signing instead a $155 million, six-year contract to play with the Chicago Cubs. If you have read this far, you certainly know that the Cubs' record of futility, not being in the World Series since World War II, and not winning it since 1908, justifies almost any action at this point. This included hiring the former Red Sox general manager, Theo Epstein, who had developed Lester after his predecessor drafted him back in 2002.
Who made the mistake? Was it the Red Sox in not raising the ante, or the Cubs in risking over $25 million of their finite resources on only one of 25 major-league roster slots? It's an interesting question, because the answer will not be known for at least 3-4 years. According to the likeliest scenario, given Lester's age and the length of the contract, the Cubs will get perhaps three years of worthwhile productivity out of Lester, and three years of regret.
While Lester has been remarkably durable to date (save his dealings with lymphoma and recovery in 2006), so were many of the other players given extended contracts in their age 30 or 31 seasons. So the fact that almost none of those players has produced at the level the contract would have demanded has to be balanced against the track record of the player himself.
It's a bizarre dynamic, for sure, that in baseball these players keep getting big, long free-agent contracts that turn out to be rewards not for what they do under the contract itself, but what they did for their previous employer. In the case of a pitcher, it's even more harmful to the contracting team, because the pitcher is contributing for only 20% of the team's games even when healthy.
But I digress; back to the Cubs and the Red Sox. Boston's GM, Ben Cherington, actually did make two such signings of free-agent position players this off-season, Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez. Those were shorter, Sandoval for five years and Ramirez four, and Sandoval is only 28, so the risks are lower, though the money is large.
There is no doubt that the Red Sox wanted Lester back. You don't offer to spend 130 times what I could comfortably retire on for someone you're indifferent to. But there is a valuation that the team ultimately came to, as far as how much a 30-year-old free agent starting pitcher, who can influence only 33 games a year, is worth as a part of a finite salary budget -- especially when the likelihood of him doing so for even half of the six seasons is very low.
And as much as I'd like to have seen Lester return to the team he originally signed with, I applaud fiscal sanity, or at least a fiscal plan. The Boston fans will not be happy, since they tend to think of team revenues as unlimited, and also ignorantly conflate the wealth of their owners with the revenues of the team. But let it be noted that they just committed for 2015 a combined amount comparable to the average annual value of Lester's Cubs contract to three just-acquired pitchers -- Wade Miley, Rick Porcello and Justin Masterson. None is quite as good as Lester, but each has had good success in the majors. And if one gets hurt, two others are still there. If Lester gets hurt, the Cubs have ...
As a fan, I'm OK with Boston's red line on Lester. Jon Lester has always seemed like a good guy, and if he can lead the Cubs to success in the first few years of his contract when he is expected to perform well, more power to him. But a part of me hopes that he is unable to complete the contract, so as to add yet one more example of the futility of throwing cash after pennants by buying players past their primes. I'd prefer to see the economics of the game scale down to affordability, sure, but more importantly I'd like to see intelligence and data dominate the front offices of major-league baseball.
Like the unicorn and the Tooth Fairy, the end of stupid contracts is not to be with us soon. But perhaps one by one, the 30 teams will gradually impose common sense in their economics.
Ahhhh, there will always be the Yankees, so no.
Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton
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