Stats Geek on Jack

Today the Stats Geek tries to assuage the worries that Jack Wilson has been overpaid with this new contract (he admits he himself was worried about it). At first read it makes sense, but going deeper there's just something that just doesn't quite fit.

He compares Wilson's contract with those of Edgar Renteria, Rafael Furcal, Orlando Cabrera, Cristan Guzman, Omar Vizquel, and David Eckstein. He says that except Eckstein, Wilson's contract compares favorably with all of them. From the perspective that Wilson's contract falls smack in the middle and that he's definitely not better than Furcal or Eckstein and he definitely is better than Guzman and maybe Vizquel at this point of his career, while being at least comparable to Cabrera and Renteria, the contract makes sense. Of course, hindsight's always 20/20. Cabrera signed his contract after a 58 game run with the Red Sox where he sparked them to the Series with a .294/.320/.465 line. Renteria was a key component in the Murderer's Row of the 2004 Cards and had won back to back Gold Gloves. His offensive and defensive performance in Boston is much maligned, but his OPS dropped only form .728 to .721. Admittedly, Cristan Guzman's contract is an unmitigated disaster and Omar Vizquel was paid mostly on reputation.

Wilson on the other hand, is coming off of a .257/.299/.363 year. While all of those contracts were awarded by big market teams (except the Nats contract to Guzman, which is disqualified on the Jim Bowden factor) to free agent players coming off of career years, we (a small market team) gave that contract to a non-free agent player coming off of an awful year. The situations are not comparable. My complaint isn't that Jack Wilson will definitely not be worth the money that we're paying him, because he very well might, it's that it's at least as probable that he won't be worth the money and we had two years to figure out whether he was or not before comitting to the contract. It's worth noting that everyone (minus Vizquel) that signed those contracts are of comparable age to Wilson and all suffered dropoffs in play except Eckstein after signing the deals (minus Furcal who hasn't played yet). If anything, the comparison might be that people thought Renteria and Cabrera were maybe a little overpaid after they signed (the gut feeling many people had after we extended Jack), and one year later their contracts look like albatrosses.