Cameron Overpaid?

I’m very curious about that. Would the Cubs, Padres, or Yankees expand their “budgets” to sign Cameron? If they stuck to their plans they wouldn’t sign Cameron. I’m not convinced they wouldn’t pay him though

And yes, they did overpay him. They were buying a top-of-the-lineup center fielder with power. They got good offensive production for a center fielder, but unfortunately Damon WAS breaking down like the Sox claimed, and ended up stashed in left field and not even doing a very good job over there. We talk in this topic about how the only way that Crawford’s bat plays in left is because he’s a top-tier defensive corner outfielder (though I maintain that amounts to little more than an average centerfielder. Maybe slightly better), but Damon’s very similar bat came with NEGATIVE left field defense. That’s kind of inexcusable, especially at 13 million a year, and especially given that his numbers were uniquely boosted by the New Yankee Stadium.

He’s not a Lugo overpay, but he’s definitely overpaid.

But Cameron has better instincts in center. When we’re talking about balls with hangtime of just a few seconds, it’s very important to get a good jump. So Cameron.

And it’s a short term contract so if he does start to decline, the Sox shouldn’t see too much of it

By 2007, Damon’s second year in NY, he was no longer able to play CF. Damon did not start “earning” his MFY contract until he moved to LF. The fact that Damon could no longer play CF is a sign of decline, as is the fact that defense in LF is getting significantly worse.

A) Brad Lidge was one of the worst pitchers in the game last year. Possibly THE worst.
B) The throw to second bounced in, coming from Ruiz who throws out less than 30% of base stealers, against Brad Lidge who has over the last 4 years a 29-2 SB-CS record. The steal of third came because nobody was covering. Mike Lowell would’ve had a good shot at it. Heads up? Yes. Impressive? No.

I’m not going to look up the numbers, but somebody around here convinced me at some point in the past few months that Jason Bay was declining. Obviously his HR and RBI are still fine, but there was another stat that showed a downward trend in his offense. I don’t even need to get in to his defense. Somebody back me up on this one, I’m tapping out!

But still, not the greatest class. I think we’ll be better off trying to work Reddick, Kalish and Westmoreland into the lineup than overpaying a marginal OF.

he always strikes me as a less impressive ellsbury

A player contributes a definite utility X to the team. It’s how they hit, how they defend, how they run the bases, etc. If you could make equal improvements to your team for less money, than you’re not using your money wisely. And all the contracts in the world and all the value in the world can get thrown together and someone can figure out how much some amount of utility is worth. Then you can figure out if you’re overpaying or not.

Say Crawford is worth 30 runs more than the left fielder team A would’ve signed. I’m not talking about RAR/WAR here, I’m just saying let’s say we consider Crawford or really any player X will make that much difference to a team, or around there.

Now let’s also say that team A has a bargain-bin loser as their #5 pitcher, and are starting some ancient veteran FA at first. They signed Crawford for $15 million a year when they could have signed, say, Randy Wolf and Nick Johnson for the same amount of money. Let’s say Randy Wolf puts up an ERA of 4.00 instead of the 5.00 that the bargain bin guy puts up. That’s a difference of about 25 runs. And then Nick Johnson gets on base about a third more than the crappy veteran first baseman and that leads to scoring another 15 extra runs. That’s 40 runs as compared to 30 runs. You could’ve done better for your team, and likely dodged a long-term contract with declining production in the later years.

Baseball does work as a semi-free market. Free Agents do go wherever the highest bidder is. But don’t confuse their market value and their value to the team. Otherwise every free agent’s contributions can be considered to be “worth” their salary regardless of busts or breakouts because that’s what the market demanded for them.

At the very least we know the Cubs wanted him. San Diego probably wanted him, Oakland probably wanted him. He had a lot more demand than Damon and Dye do.

I’ll tell you how it works – one team wants to pay $X for a particular player at a particular time vs. antoher theam that wants to pay $X+Y under the same circumstances. The present enviromnent, with so few teams looking to add payroll, makes it difficult for all but the best players, and even the very good players the Yankees and Red Sox do NOT want, to find big money. Why is my house worth less today than in 2000? Because there are less people that can afford to purchase it.

I dunno. I know a lot of people think that reads are too much to do with depth perception and all that to be something that you can “figure out”, but I think Ells will figure it out. Too bad it may be just in time for Boras to start asking for $8 million in arbitration.