It's that time of year when baseball general manager's start acting like Michael Jordan's sons on a Vegas bender. Ah yes, it's the annual Winter Meetings where all of baseball's movers and shakers convene on a supersized hotel to throw out millions upon millions at generally undeserving players. Recession, resmeshion. If you spent time on a major league roster last year and now find yourself a free agent, there's a good chance your bank account will have a few extra zeroes in it.Newly minted Washington National Jayson Werth should thank his agent Scott Boras for netting him what will one day (maybe tomorrow) be viewed as one of baseball's worst contracts. How a player who has three good seasons under his belt, and at 32-years-old gets locked up for seven years and $126 million is so far gone, it makes one wonder if Nationals GM Mike Rizzo has a serious drug problem.
The Nats lost 93 games last year. There is no reason to believe they will contend in the near future. Their prized prospect Stephen Strasburg's arm exploded after a handful of big league starts. They just lost their main power source in Adam Dunn to the Chicago White Sox for less than half of what Werth will earn.
And it's not like the Nats haven't seen countless $100 million plus contracts that have backfired terribly. Starting with the $105 million contract the Dodgers handed pitcher Kevin Brown in 1999, the list of players in the $100 million club seems like a cautionary tale. Mike Hampton. Jason Giambi. Carlos Lee. Carlos Beltran. Vernon Wells. Alfonso Soriano. Barry Zito. Even my beloved Ken Griffey Jr. makes this list for contracts that fail miserably to offer any significant return on investment.
The money isn't even the biggest issue. Player's salaries inflate every year. The problem usually is the length of the $100 million contracts. What kind of numbers will Wells and Soriano put up in the final year of their deals in 2013 and 2014, respectively? It's almost as frightening as imagining what Heidi Montag's face will look like then.
But despite all the bad $100 million plus deals that have gone down since Kevin Brown's, franchises continue to pull out their checkbooks without hesitation. Because as long as owners continue to try t0 one-up each other with their overpriced trophies, players will continue to flock to the highest bidder and continue to put up underwhelming numbers for the money.
