Hot Stove Alert: Cubs sign bad free agent, but this time they only MIGHT overpay him

As reported by Jayson Stark, the Cubs and Cliff Floyd have agreed to an incentive-loaded one-to-two year deal that could make Floyd anywhere from $3mill to $17.5mill, depending on how many at bats Floyd receives next season.

But of course, barring injuries or something wholly unexpected--like, say, Cliff Floyd being able to walk without a cane again--he won't see much more than that guaranteed $3million. That's not to say, of course, that the Cubs would be much worse off with a cripple playing in right ahead of No-Arm McGee-Jones. The point is that his incentives are ridiculous--not only because they're so far-fetched, but because they're so far out of his control.

He can make up to $17.5 million over two years if he has 550 plate appearances in each of the next two years. He would make $15.5 million if he gets 500 plate appearances in each of the next two years.

Consider that for a second. Now riddle me this: How do those stipulations in any way offer incentive to Floyd? Does anyone--Jim Hendry, Cliff Floyd, Barry Weinsteinberg (Floyd's agent, cheaplaugh Jew joke) included--think that Floyd will perform his way into that money?

What incentive could this contract possibly offer Floyd? The incentive to put a hurtin' on Matt Murton? Or cast a spell-a on Lou Pinella? I really can't see how else Floyd might cash in. Wherein lies the problem with most incentive contracts--the incentives are stupid.

Now I'm not against incentive contracts in principle. A guy is a high-risk investment, so you want his pay dictated on actual results and not projected results. Ok, I'm fine with that. You have poor faith in humanity and believe that players need immediate financial gain riding on their level of effort. Alright, I can accept that too. But why not make sure the incentive is something that will actually help the team?

Granted, the Floyd deal is way better than, say, if I were an NBA GM and told Gilbert Arenas, "Hey, I'll pay you an extra $20million if you score 84 to 85 points per game." It's workable because Floyd can't really hurt the Cubs by not fulfilling the incentive. Essentially this deal says, "We'd rather not pay or play you very much, and if all goes according to plan, we won't. But should we have to, we'll see to it that you get paid more than your market value as an everyday player. And if it things go according to plan, you'll still get more than market value as a bench player while making friends with Henry Blanco."

Of course, it's nice to be the Cubs and have no financial constraints whatsoever (except when it comes to your best player and the best pitcher in the league). Otherwise, a deal like this is a waste and does, in fact, hurt the team. Having said that, it can theoritically only hurt a team's payroll and not its on-field perfomance since his bonus hinges strictly on being needed. That is, unless Floyd actually does attempt to kill Matt Murton, or better yet, pays Murton large sums of money to copy passages from Encyclopedia Britanica while he steals his at-bats and tunnels his way into Murton's house.

I do, however, have a problem with performance-based incentives that a player can consciously dictate during isolated game situations. The ill-conceived "Arenas 84.5 Clause" would be a pretty good example of this. And while admittedly, stat-based incentives can't be nearly as damaging in an individual-oriented sport like baseball as they can be in basketball, they tend to be poorly conceived nonetheless.

Consider that a popular stat-based incentive in baseball is the RBI--a ludicrously poor indicator of the player's value. About a third of RBI accummulation is actual performance, while the other two thirds simply reflect the strength of preceding hitters and the mere opportunity to play every day. (Note: Ratios not exact. At all.) Yet this can bring on all sorts of personality conflicts, stemming from frustration with teammates and batting order, and it creates a rich-get-richer spoils system for established players. So in short, it's crap.

Let's be clear--I don't buy into the whole mentality of "This guy's an asshole and a team cancer and gives our team asshole cancer because he won't lay down a bunt or weakly ground out to second because of his greedy greed and money money money." But there's no doubt that a player will change his swing to knock out five more dingers and fulfill an incentive, even if costs him 80 points on his OBP. I know; a homerun clause is probably an obsolete example to make my point. But given the ferverently reactionary anti-power backlash since the early aughts, maybe we'll soon see sac bunt clauses or weak-groundball-to-the-right-side clauses. And my point would still stand. No matter the short-sighted stat, the situational bent toward a particual stat is nearly always damaging.

Sure, a player can choose to be steadfast, forthright, and pure and refuse to put the well-being of his bonus over the well-being of his team. But embedded in some psychological tick among his split-second impulses (you know, the part of your mind you use to hit a baseball), the bent toward that bonus stat will always reside. And for a player, the opportunities to work toward such incentives are too immediately identifiable.

Which finally gets to my point. To be effective, performance incentives should actually measure performance. They shouldn't reward success in some singular category that only loosely reflects a player's contribution to his team. And maybe just as importantly, statistical incentives shouldn't be so trackable and so apparent in isolated situations. A player should be rewarded for more wholistic contributions--those that maximize his abilities in all facets, not ones that overextend his limitations in one area at the expense of others. Easily trackable incentives no doubt strip some of the invaluable instinctiveness from an athlete's approach. And when that happens, raw ability suffers, and individual approach is stifled.

Also consider that such small-scale outcomes make for poor motivators over the course of a six-month season. Players can only go so long trying extra hard to come through in these isolated instances--which, oh by the way, doesn't actually work--throughout the course of the season. They can lead a player to obsess about the blips and failures and deflect their focus from just generally playing well. Incentives should motivate a guy to do things like stay in shape and stay sober on gamedays, not to pop an extra greenie when the bases are loaded.

But I guess that gets to the sticky issue of whether players and agents trust measures like VORP or Player Efficiency Rating enough to replace RBI, ppg, TDs, etc. I would guess that there will always be a reluctance precisely because they are complicated and difficult to track. But I'd also guess that over time, these types of performance indicators will be accepted on the player end, as they're already growing more and more accepted on the management end.

And sports agents are pretty savvy dudes. Even more so than mangaement, I'm sure that most, if not all agents are well-aware how retarded it is to use RBI as a primary performance indicator. Then again, if they're Scott Boras, they also know full well that their middle-of-the-order established superstar clients will disproportionately profit from these faulty incentive clauses and that there's always a Jim Hendry to gladly indulge said profits. So who knows.

So what does this all have to do with Cliff Floyd? Well...shit. Nothing, really. I got way the hell off topic, didn't I? Except I at least managed to bookend the post with jabs at Jim Hendry, so that's a good thing.

Anyway. Yeah. Performance incentives. Something. Goodnight.