DUGOUT: Ill-advised contracts becoming common in baseball

It’s fun to criticize mistakes in baseball.

Whether it’s a ground ball between the legs of Bill Buckner, or a pop-fly that bounces out of the glove of Luis Castillo, people who make millions of dollars and fail on the grandest of stages are easy targets for ridicule.

General managers are no exception.

Since I’ll never have access to hundreds of millions of dollars to spread out among 25 baseball players, I find it easy to laugh and shake my head in awe when a general manager inexplicably gives a player far more than he’s worth.

Barry Zito is the most well-known instance of a massive contract gone wrong. The Giants gave Zito $126 million over seven years after the 2006 season, but his ERA hasn’t been below 4.40 since.

A more horrendous contract than that, however, is the one given to Vernon Wells by the Toronto Blue Jays. Even though it doesn’t receive nearly the grief of the disastrous Zito contract, this deal is one of the worst in baseball history.

Following a brilliant 2006 campaign (including 32 home runs, 17 stolen bases, a .302 batting average, and a Gold Glove), the Blue Jays offered the outfielder a seven-year deal worth $126 million.

This deal could almost be understandable, even acceptable, if Wells continued to play on par with his 2006 season.

However, he hasn’t repeated those successes. Not by a long shot.

This year, Wells has an OPS+ of 84. (OPS is a statistic used to measure overall offensive performance. OPS+ is a weighted formula that compares a player to the rest of the league. An OPS+ of 100 is perfectly average.)

For comparison, teammate Marco Scutaro — making just over $1 million this year — has an OPS+ of 118.

Wells is making $1.5 million dollars this year, hardly ridiculous. In 2011, though, he will make $23 million. And $21 million more in 2012. And he is scheduled to make another $21 million in both 2013 and 2014.

As Joe Posnanski kids, “This deal, to be honest, is not the sort of thing that leads to a general manager getting fired. It’s the sort of thing that leads to entire villages getting pillaged.”

If Wells isn’t earning his paycheck now, how can a 35-year-old possibly expect to justify his $21 million salary in 2014?

Major credit is due to Brian Peters, Wells’ agent. How did he get a general manager to agree to a deal like that? It probably looked awful back in 2006, but when the Blue Jay’s payroll dropped by $18 million this year, it looked even worse.

Toronto needs all the money it can get their hands on, as it will be very difficult to field a team on an $80 million payroll when one player takes up over a quarter of it. Considering that Toronto inexplicably owes B.J. Ryan — now out of baseball — $10 million next year because they cut him from the team this year, the Blue Jays are in serious financial trouble.

This is before you add in the inevitable depature of ace Roy Halladay. Given that the Jays failed to find a deal they liked before this year’s trading deadline, Toronto might bid farewell to one of baseball’s top pitchers without any compensation in return.

There is a clause in Wells’ contract that would enable him to opt out of his contract after the 2011 season, but where else could he find a job that pays him over $60 million for a three-year stretch of below-average performance?

Wells also possesses the valuable full no-trade clause, enabling him to veto any potential trades. Who would want to talk on Wells’ salary, though? His contract is the most un-tradable and un-cuttable in baseball. Talk about job security.

It’s fun to laugh at the mistakes of those “suits” involved in the baseball world. Were people like us in control of hundreds of millions of dollars, the baseball world would surely be a better place. Right?

Andrew Kneeland is a junior at the Arizona Virtual Academy. He is an intern at the Green Valley News.