Read the opposing arguments from Babe Ruthless and Loyal Homer.
With all due respect to my colleagues (and they are due respect), they are freakin’ off their rockers if they think they found a worse contract in professional baseball than the one with Alfonso Soriano’s scrawl on it.
Soriano is in year four of an eight year contract that will pay him $136M. He will receive ONLY $136M because, though his contract does have performance incentives in them, he will never reach them. That guaranteed $136M is his BASE salary for eight pointless years on Chicago’s North Side. Included in this joke of a contract was an $8M signing bonus and a full no-trade clause (which just seems ironic at this point). Those performance incentives are for being the top vote getting in the All-Star voting (how many times can Mrs. Soriano vote before getting carpal tunnel, I wonder), for being the World Series MVP, LCS MVP, MLB MVP, or winning a gold glove. Ha. Ha. How ambitious was Soriano’s agent, Diego Bentz, or how drunk was Cubs general manager Jim Hendry, to even consider such outlandish performance incentives. Given Soriano’s track record and career contributions, how were those achievements considered realistic?
Speaking of Diego Bentz, did you know that he gets paid $850,000 for each year of Soriano’s contract? For those of you quick at math, that is $6.8M. Kudos, Diego – but I think you should be in jail for fraud.
Before taking a deeper dive into the finer points of Soriano’s embarrassing contract, here is some context. Soriano’s contract is currently the ninth largest in Major League Baseball. You are probably asking, “But Sports Geek, surely there are worse players than Soriano in the top eight players.” If you are saying that, then you would be mistaken. Here is a list of the eight players in front of Soriano:
- Alex Rodriguez: $275M
- Derek Jeter: $252M
- Joe Mauer: $189M
- Mark Teixiera: $180
- C.C. Sabathia: $161M
- Miguel Cabrera: $152.3M
- Todd Helton: $151.5M
- Johan Santana: $137.5M
- Alfonso Soriano: $136M
Baseball contracts – like any contract in any business – are all about value. Value is determined primarily by calculating the return on a given investment.
Rodriguez, Jeter, Teixiera, and Sabathia have all delivered championships for their team, therefore the return on investment is solid. While Mauer, Cabrera, Helton, and Santana have not yet won championships they still share a common trait of not sucking. Joe Mauer is one of the top catchers in the majors and fresh off an MVP season where he hit a stellar .365 to win the batting title. Even in a down year where Cabrera was accused of being overweight and under-motivated he hit .292, belted 37 homers, and notched an AL leading 331 total bases. Todd Helton had one bad season where he hit .264, but he also suffered from injuries all season. For his career he is a .328 batter. Santana has only posted three full seasons with an ERA over three in his entire career. And even when his ERA was over three, 3.33 was where it topped out… which was in 2007 when he was still fifth in Cy Young voting.
And then we arrive at Soriano. Impressively, Soriano has struck out 1,189 times in his career. Amazing, especially when you consider that he has earned lucked into a walk just 338 times. That is a good indication that Soriano is a junk ball hitter and total free swinger. He makes it seem as though Jacques Jones has the patience of Ted Williams. Soriano is a one pitch hitter, like Jobu from Major League.
Soriano’s batting average has dropped each season with the Cubs, as has his on base percentage and slugging percentage. The inverse relationships between his yearly salary and on-field production is suspect.
Do you remember those incentives for postseason performance? Here’s why they’re a crock. Soriano is a lifetime .213 hitter in the postseason, including .143 and .071 for two postseason campaigns with the Cubs. In 44 career postseason games he has walked (SOMEhow) nine times… compared to 53 whiffs. At least the Cubs will get a bargain on postseason payouts.
You may be thinking that, though Soriano’s stats certainly are not very good, surely he must realize that fact and announce he is going to redouble his efforts and improve his game, right? Wrong.
“I still have the talent,” he was quoted as saying in a Washington Post article a few weeks ago. “The only thing for me is to stay healthy, so I can help the team win. If I stay healthy, I will put up the numbers.”
Anyone interested in a big glass of denial?
This is partly an article about Soriano, and partly an article devoted to the long-forgotten promise of one James Hendry, the general manager for the Chicago Cubs.
We have all had those “moments” in our professional work lives where everything just gets overwhelming. The normal human response is to request some time off, clear the cobwebs, and comeback refreshed and ready to maintain your creativity. In fact, studies show that the most creative people are the ones who do a good job balancing work and their personal lives. When Jim Henry completed the deal to sign free agent pitching Ted Lilly in 2006 he was hooked up to an EKG machine. That, Jim, was a clear sign that it was time to take a few days and regroup. What many in the press applauded as a Herculean effort was in truth the death of creativity for a once promising general manager.
Had Hendry not been exhausted or overwhelmed or been given too many resources or whatever the excuse du jour is, he probably would have noticed some alarming statistics that should have prevented the signing. For example, as baseball heads deeper into the sabermetrics era, Hendry completely missed that signing a leadoff hitter who gets on base once every three at bats is just not good enough. A total of 406 strikeouts in the three years preceding the signing are not good for a leadoff hitter and are a rally killer at any point in the game. Bottom line, with a stat line like Soriano’s it should have been evident that he – like his contract – would be an albatross on consistent production. Hendry’s unwillingness to acknowledge that Soriano was not built for the long run, and remain enamored with the desire to fill the Cubs lineup with home run hitters, triggered an eight year mistake. As a loyal Cubs fan, I would take a three year Milton Bradley mistake over an eight year Soriano mistake every time.
From now until 2014 Alfonso Soriano will earn $18M every season. That is pretty good for a player who always avoided or lost in arbitration. That is pretty good for a player that started his career in Japan where he hit .118 before signing with the Yankees as a minor leaguer. The Cubs are stuck with Soriano because they had newly minted resources flowing through their pockets during a Winter where Soriano was the best alternative. Despite statistics, logic, and “gut feel,” the Cubs signed Soriano to what is now, without a doubt, the worst contract in professional baseball.
Posted by Sports Geek 
