So I have finally finished tallying the responses to the Awful Pirates Signing trivia question. Suffice to say that I had no idea there were so many Pirates fans out there, or, for that matter, that so many of you could correctly spell “Jeromy Burnitz.”
The most amusing thing about the list of guesses, though I guess not amusing if you’re a Pirates fan, is the breadth of the candidate pool: Twenty-two different current and former Buccos (and one noted non-Bucco) got votes, with the numbers spread around pretty evenly. There was, however, one definite front-runner - unfortunately, he wasn’t the right answer:
Derek Bell 52
Kevin Young 32
Pat Meares 28
Jeromy Burnitz 18
Jason Kendall 8
Sean Casey 7
Jack Wilson 6
Jose Mesa 3
Joe Randa 3
Gil Meche 2
Randall Simon 2
Jay Bell 1
Mike Benjamin 1
Kris Benson 1
Shawn Chacon 1
Wil Cordero 1
Doug Drabek 1
Roberto Hernandez 1
Jeff Reboulet 1
Pokey Reese 1
Don Slaught 1
Andy Van Slyke 1
Daryle Ward 1
U.L. Washington 1
(Yes, two people apparently thought that the Gil Meche signing was so bad that it could be blamed on a team in the other league, and at least one person thinks that Christina has been writing Transaction Analysis since her freshman year of college.)
The legendary “Operation Shutdown” was the popular choice as fitting the description of “perpetually mediocre (or worse) players, players who haven’t earned the right to keep their jobs, but who keep them because they were expensive, and possibly even good once or twice in their careers.” But in fact there was an even more apropos example. Congrats, then, to those 32 readers who IDed the man that Christina was actually writing about back in 1999: the inimitable Kevin Young, who went on to put up a career-best .296 EqA that season (the final one of his old contract), then underwhelmed as expected throughout his new four-year, $24 million deal, capping out the contract, and his career, with a Neifiriffic .202/.302/.321 line in 2003.
So that’s the trivia answer. But what about the larger question: Who was actually the biggest waste of money among the Pirates’ myriad bad signings in recent years? Nate Silver’s MORP formula provides one objective way of evaluating the contenders; Nate hasn’t calculated MORP going all the way back to 1999, but suggested just devaluing last year’s formula by 8% a year, which I’ve done. The results for the top vote-getters:
WARP1 MORP actual salary ROI
Derek Bell -0.2 -$47,452 $9,000,000 -$9,047,452
Kevin Young 2.8 $1,238,070 $24,000,000 -$22,761,930
Pat Meares 2.4 $2,094,964 $15,000,000 -$12,905,036
Jeromy Burnitz 0.2 $89,015 $6,700,000 -$6,610,985
Jason Kendall 29.0 $31,896,062 $60,000,000 -$28,103,938
(WARP is cumulative over the life of the contract. I cheated on Jason Kendall, who’s still finishing out the six-year extension he signed with Pittsburgh in 2000, by using his PECOTA-projected WARP for 2007.)
According to these numbers, Young blew Bell out of the water in burning through Bucs bucks, providing barely any more production for 167% more money. It’s Jason Kendall, though, who though the far better ballplayer was the truly epic waste of cash, his five-win-a-year talent no match for the stupendous moneybags that Cam Bonifay handed him.
One bright sign for the long haul is that Pittsburgh, which hiked its payroll from $13.7 million in 1998 to $22.2 million this year (27th in the majors), plans to raise it to $35 million next season and to $45 million in 2001, when the team moves into a new stadium. This off-season the front office showed it was serious by signing first baseman Kevin Young to a four-year, $24 million contract extension.
Contrast with Christina’s closing comment on the deal at the time: “That’s no way to build a ballclub, unless your organizational goal is play patsy to the Astros for the next decade.” Score one for our prognosticators.
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