I'm Getting Too Old for This

I wish I could just laugh at this kind of crap and let it go, but I just can't help myself. I think it's becoming a disorder.

Money Players

When I saw this description,

Alex Rodriguez may never produce numbers worthy of $25M a season. But does that make the Yankees third baseman baseball's biggest bust? And who are MLB's bargains? Kieran Darcy did some digging.

...on the espn.com homepage, I was really, really hoping that Kieran Darcy would turn out to be some unknown intelligent baseball mind so I wouldn't have to rip apart his crappy little chart on our crappy little blog. But he's not, so I do. (Again, the thing about my disorder.)

Aside from the fact that most of his "overpaid" guys are either injured players or guys at the tail end of long-term contracts from the unquestionably overinflated late-90s/early aughts salary boom and the fact that most of the "Bargain Basement" guys are simply awesome players who have not reached their free agent eligibility, some of his choices are a trifle off. Which is to say they're terrible.

The "Worth Every Million" category confuses me in general. These are more or less a handful of the best players in the league and, accordingly, among the highest paid. By being both a) the best and b) the highest paid (by current market value, mind you; not freakish 2000 market value), some might conclude that these players are rather fairly paid.

A more critical baseball mind might further conclude that a couple of these guys border on overpaid. I am that critical baseball mind. And as such, I conclude that:

1) Curt Schilling at that price is most definitely overpaid at his current career stage and ability level, and furthermore, Darcy gives a horrendous justification.

Who would you rather have on the mound in the postseason?

Technically, this isn't a justification at all. Technically, it's a question. And technically, I could not only list at least ten guys I'd rather have in any game--playoffs included--but I could also point out that "Whom" is the word he should have used. (And you can bet I would point that out.)

2) How is Mariano Rivera underpaid? I'm sorry; I don't care how good a reliever is. I understand the impact of pitchers in general and the greatness of one "Mo" Rivera. But he's a pitcher that pitches less than 100 innings per year, and I can't justify that fact with $10.5mill per.

Worse yet, he goes on to list Eric Gagne in the "Worst Buys of All" category at $10mill per. This begs the question: what is the premise of these sports bargain articles in general? Are they to point out poor signings caused by poor management decisions? Or is it simply a way to compare production to salary?

If it's the former, then Gagne is every bit if not more of a "bargain" based on the timing and amount of the two signings. If it's the latter (as it mostly clearly is in this case), why not just take each player's salary and divide it by some simple metric (OPS, WHIP, ERA) and rank players by this ratio, stashing injured players in a separate category? But God forbid he be formulaic; then he might lose the facade of subjective insight. Instead, he woud prefer to waste space by letting us know that Eric Gagne is hurt. Thanks--I hadn't noticed.

As a final point, note how many frequently-bitched-about Yellow Chair transgressions pop up in his punchy one-sentence diagnoses: ARod's a choker...this guy is clutch...this guy wins Gold Gloves...this guy gets lots of saves. Also note that Kieran sounds like a girl's name.