I can't say I disagree. Delgado didn't make it to free agency...so who were the Jays bidding against? Essentially themselves. Now apparently they had to choose either or with Green or Delgado (though for some reason they ended up tying themselves to a big ticket to replace Green anyway) so yes it makes sense that they go to the wall for Delgado as a guy who was coming off a huge season. But...that seventeen million per year would have still been their at the end of 2001...I'm not sure why the Jays didn't wait to see if Delgado repeated his huge season before tossing him all that cash. Given his return to his "normal" production levels in 2001, they could easily have still signed Delgado and not paid as much.

The truth is the front office panicked...because it had already been over five years since they took over a sinking ship from Gillick (and it was in pretty bad shape) and the club still wasn't a lock to break 90 wins. Despite the fact that they had acquired and traded various big tickets such as David Cone, Roger Clemens, David Wells, Randy Myers, Shawn Green, etc... They had to make like they were able to keep at least one player long term...or else they probably would have traded Delgado for Eric Karros and Andy Ashby and signed them both long term.

I agree with the writer of the article. Fans can be very inconsistent when it comes to how much a person makes. They will blast Alex Rodriguez for making $25 million, but at the same time they will feel sorry for a team owner who makes many times more than that per year.

I just wish that the fans could see how they are ultimately the ones responsible for athletes making as much as they do. They're the ones who buy the tickets, wear the team caps, watch the advertising during games, etc. If fans didn't willingly hand over billions of dollars each year to professional sports, these athletes would be making a lot less than they currently do. It's not the fault of the athletes that there's so much demand to see them perform.

When I become ruler of the world, I am going to make it a requirement that fans must successfully complete a first-year economics course before they are allowed to whine about how much athletes make.

It's not the high salaries that bother me, it's the disingenuosness that comes with them. "I wanted to take care of my family," "I was looking to stay close to home," "I wanted to play for a contender," etc. Say it was about the money and less people would be upset about it, because nobody would turn down that kind of cash, moral high horse or no.

On the other hand, my biggest problem with Rodgriguez's contract was how much more it was than the previous Highest Contract Ever. If A-rod had signed for $20 million per, a "reasonable" amount, guys like Ramirez and Delgado and Giambi may not be drawing salaries quite as fat, and poor souls like Brad Fullmer would be earning more than their paltry $1 million. Guess he better cancel his order for that ivory back-scratcher.

Guess he better cancel his order for that ivory back-scratcher.

Ivory backscratcher? Nonsense! Like the Sun King, Fullmer spend all his disposable cash on mirrors.

If A-rod had signed for $20 million per, a "reasonable" amount, guys like Ramirez and Delgado and Giambi may not be drawing salaries quite as fat,

Delgado signed his contract before Rodriguez even filed for free agency.

The contracts that Ramirez and Giambi received depended on what teams were willing to pay for their services. They could base their contract demands on what Rodriguez received, but unless there were teams willing to give them that much, it wouldn't have been very useful.

I think Ramirez and Giambi would have received salaries similar to what they did, with or without Rodriguez (who I consider to be an anomaly). Shawn Green signed for an average of $14 million with the Dodgers a year before Ramirez went on the market. Given that Ramirez was a better hitter with more career accomplishments, I don't think his average of $20 million per year was out of line. It's a similar story with Giambi, who got an average salary very similar to Delgado's, despite being a better player.

Delgado's salary looks ludicrously high now for the same reason that Nortel's peak stock prices look ridiculous - we're no longer in a boom market. At the time Delgado was signed, top players' salaries were increasing at the rate of several million a year. Contracts signed as recently as three years previously were looking like bargains in 2000. (When Clemens signed with the Jays at $6 million per, the general consensus was that Toronto had overpaid. By 2001, people were throwing $10 million a year at pitchers like Darren Dreifort.)

The Jays also had a credibility problem at the time. Interbrew's penny pinching meant that the Jays were perceived as a team that weren't seriously interested in trying to contend. The team's best players, such as Green and Clemens, were abandoning ship at the first available opportunity, and the local media were gleefully predicting a Montreal-style death spiral. The Jays needed to sign Delgado to prove that, yes, they were serious players; at the time, I figured that Delgado and his agent had the Jays over a barrel for precisely this reason.

It could be worse. Delgado is actually producing, and it's still possible that he could return to his 2000 level. His manager and GM are solidly behind him now. I'd rather see the Jays spend $17 million on Delgado and $3 million on spare parts than $5 million on four mediocrities (otherwise known as The Oriole Way [tm]). And Carlos is a career Jay and, by all accounts, a responsible citizen; if you have to overpay somebody, he's probably the best choice.

Rodriguez's contract was unique- it set the upper limit on FA deals b/c he is the most perfect one to ever hit the market- very young but with an established history of excellence, superior defensive player at a key position, best offensive player at that position perhaps in history, consistent record of staying healthy, trouble-free (tf marketable) public persona, and even has considerable speed. (why the Mets didn't sign him, I'll never understand) It seems like this set the bar for all other FA- if A-Rod grabs 26 mil for having all of those characteristics (essentially, the most perfect FA conceivable), then others can be compared to him positively or negatively.

The other thing to consider is the broader economic context these salaries were being given out in. Its tough to say b/c the bust effectively ended the escalation of player salaries, but it seems like A-Rod's contract would've placed an upper limit on them.

As this relatees to the Jays, I will never understand the Green trade. It is rare that an organization produces so many great hitters at once, and the Jays produced Delgado, Green, and Stewart, but instead of turning converting Green into an asset actually turned him into both an on- and off-field liability. The ineptitude is staggering. Image what the team would've looked like with Green instead of Raul in RF for the last few years, or with some decent pitching prospects landed and Mondesi's salary allocated elsewhere.

"I will never understand the Green trade."

On the assumption that you, or at least somebody reading this, really _doesn't_ understand it, here are all the things that led to the Green trade:

1. Green's hometown is L.A.
2. Mondesi was becoming unpopular in L.A.
3. Mondesi had heard good things about Toronto from some friend or other of his who'd played here.
4. The Jays, for some stupid reason, rehired Cito Gaston as their batting coach (this is the one that _I_ don't understand).
5. Green didn't care for Cito as a manager.
6. Green had only one year left before he was eligible for free agency.
7. Green decided he had no intentions of signing with Toronto.
8. Ash didn't want Green to walk and leave him with nothing to show for it but a draft pick.
9. Mondesi and Green have the same agent.
10. Mondesi and Green have the same list of skills (although Green's better).

So it was perfect. Except for, you know, the fact that the Jays had to pay Mondesi too much for not enough for too long.

OK, let me clear this up. I understood why it became necessary to trade Green. What makes so little sense is why the Jays weren't more accomodating to him to try and make him want to stay. After you establish that he needs to be traded, then you decide where to send him and for what. The Jays knew Mondesi would be expensive (even though they were bidding against themselves), and that there would be pressure to keep him seeing as they had just given up so much to get him. So Mondesi seemed like a poor choice to me, though at the time, the optomist in me (back before Fat Gord killed it) bought all that crap about Mondesi being a headcase that just needed a change of scenery to get focused.

The talent Toronto has squandered in bad trades over the last 10 years is really staggering. From paying Olerud to play for the Mets then letting Person go to the Clemens deal to Green to the disasterous Loiza/Guthrie trades to losing a 30-HR SS for nothing to the final straw of the Sirotka deal (even getting unlucky with Carpenter by not pulling the trigger on a deal before he "got" hurt in '02), the Jays have produced/dealt a ton of talent with very little to show for it.

If only JP had been here a couple of years earlier.

"OK, let me clear this up. I understood why it became necessary to trade Green."

I kind of suspected you did. But, you know, there may have been lurkers who joined the party late.

"...the optomist in me (back before Fat Gord killed it)..."

This phrase caught my attention. I think the Ash era affected a lot of people that way. When Ricciardi was first hired and started swinging his axe, a lot of fans reacted with consternation because they simply didn't believe in rebuilding any more. Many of them have had their optimism rekindled by Eric Hinske et al., but there are still a lot of skeptics (including some in the media). And then there are those who think that the downward attendance trend is going to continue until the team contracts or leaves town; that's also a product of the Ash era. Opinions?

(Personally, my optimism remained bulletproof all the way through; even when Ash was fired, my reaction was, "Well, I'm not surprised, but maybe if they had given him one more chance he would have clued in...")

And didn't the Jays guarantee an option year for Mondesi when he was traded (which would be this year's contract)?

Why is Alex Rodriguez vilified for making ~$25M a year while no one says a word about the ~$18M that Derek Jeter makes?

$18M for the 4th best shortstop in the league? (And quite likely 5th best in 2002.)

If the gap in talent between Rodriguez and Jeter isn't yet worth the $7M difference, it soon will be.

At the end of 1999, I still had some reservations about Green and wasn't completely opposed to trading him. I was mainly worried that he might have had a career year in 1999 and wouldn't be worth the kind of money he was going to receive. In October of 1999 -- before the trade talk really started -- I said the following on the Jays newsgroup:

If the Blue Jays want to contend next year it might be worth the risk of signing Green and hoping for the best, but I still have nightmares about being stuck with a left-handed version of Raul Mondesi.

I guess I was right about Green turning into Raul Mondesi -- it just didn't happen the way I expected.

I once read about A-Rod reflecting on his contract and all the negative reaction it engendered, and making an observation along these lines: "If a guy wins $250 million in a lottery, everyone's happy for him. If a guy gets $250 million through talent, hard work and determination, he gets booed." To me, this sums up perfectly the foolishness of fans complaining about how much a star athlete gets paid. Unlike the Kevin Youngs and Gregg Jeffries of the world, Rodriguez at least performs at a top level for his money.

Is any baseball player worth his salary? That's the wrong question to ask in a free-market economy; it's like asking whether gold is worth its going price. Consumers constantly confuse "price" -- what a given market will pay for a given commodity at a given time -- with "value," what something is really, intriniscally worth. Player salaries have everything to do with the former and virtually nothing to do with the latter, yet most baseball fans and sportswriters insist on applying the "value" definition to player salaries. The sooner everyone gets over this intellectual dishonesty, the better.

Didn't Tom Hicks basically "overpay" for Alex Rodriguez in that he was trying to bring up the visibility of his franchise? I think I remember that Atlanta was in the ballpark for about $18 million/season and the Mets dropped out early.

Did Hicks get what he wanted? There are probably a lot more casual fans talking about the Rangers than before the signing. I also remember that Hicks had a whole bunch of real estate land around the Ballpark at Arlington and that by raising the profile of his team he would in turn increase the value of that land.

Does anyone else remember all of this? I know I'm not imagining it.

As to what the players make vs what the owners make. The casual fan can see the numbers dropped in front of him/her as far as salaries go. Not so what the owners make.

One last thing, why does MLB run down their product (the players), like they do? You don't hear the producers in Hollywood bad mouthing Julia Roberts or whomever for making $20 million or more per picture.

Nice site by the way. I just recently came across it. I think a link on Baseball Primer pointed me this way.

I'd be willing to be oh, $5.00 or so (hey, I'm a student in grad school!) that Tom Hicks is not losing any money on A-Rod's contract. Now the contracts of Chan-Ho Park, his setup men, Carl Everett are another matter.

Here's a time-waster that lets you pick a celebrity and watch their income grow in "real time."

While I wrote that sentence, A-Rod earned several hundred bucks. He's still a bargain compared not only to some other overpaid bums in baseball or the NBA, but Mike Tyson, Siegfried & Roy and Bruce Willis, to name a few. If you really want to see the counter spin fast, check out George Lucas.

Dave, glad you found us. Spread the word.