Pujols signs with Angels pg 151

[Exile on Waveland]

A friend of mine (who is an extreme mathematician/stats guy) posted this in a note... makes you wonder. My boss thinks that there was something going on behind the scenes and that Pujols and Cardinals ownership/upper management didn't get along as well as it seemed, especially after seeing Holiday get his contract.

 

Typing in the 210 million the Cards offered into the "Cost of Living Wizard" at Salary.com, it says word-for-word: "The cost of living in Anaheim, CA is 31.9% higher than in St. Louis, MO. Therefore, you would have to earn a salary of $277,084,723 to maintain your current standard of living."

 

Albert didn't hit 277 - he settled for $254 mil in Anaheim. Doing the reverse calculation with the Anaheim dollars, you get $192,504,298 St. Louis dollars. But the Cards offered $210 mil! So Albert left more than 17 million dollars on the table from what he was already offered by the Cardinals to take off for LA.

That's a terrible analysis. The majority of that money is not going to be spent at all, it'll be invested.

 

Pujols will pay $10M for a house that would have cost $2M in St Louis. The rest is just noise, at the salary levels we're talking about.

 

If a $10 carwash now costs $13, that matters when you're making $25K. It doesn't matter when you're making $25M.

 

And, of course, living in sunny Southern California is a little different than humid St. Louis. Higher cost of living generally goes hand-in-hand with better places to live. Even though my money would go farther in Oklahoma, I'd still rather live in New York City.*

 

 

*Yeah, yeah, I live in crappy Indianapolis. But it's not always as easy as "NYC > Indy, I'll move there!"

[Clem Fandango]

The Cardinals pushed to 10 years and raised their offer to what, $220 million? So $22 million AAV? He's getting $25.4 million AAV in Anaheim. That's a $3.4 million difference. $3.4 million extra per year that the Cardinals would've had to pay on top of the offer they were comfortable giving him over the same amount of years.

 

Ryan Theriot cost them $3.3 million this year. If you aren't willing to make a player like Ryan Theriot, i.e. a guy in arbitration who can probably be replaced internally very easily at league minimum, a sacrificial lamb in order to accommodate arguably the greatest baseball player many of us will ever see play the game in our entire lives then you deserve to lose him.

That's not how it works.

 

Yeah, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

 

And aside from ludicrously calling Pujols a traitor or acting like he owes something to fans, people are generally okay with him not getting a legacy deal. Pujols was [expletive] amazing in 2008. It was incredible watching him play, but it would've been more incredible watching him in the postseason.

 

Watching old, lumbering 38-year-old Pujols make $25-27 million and hit like a normal guy wouldn't be thrilling. And unless they got extremely lucky in subsequent drafts and [expletive] out valuable players like diarrhea their chances of competing would've been severely compromised because of his contract. That's the reality of being a mid-market team.

 

St. Louis is on the upper crust of mid-market teams. Out of 30 teams they've routinely ranked somewhere between the 10th or 13th highest payroll in MLB, and had the 5th highest payroll in the NL this year. Zack Cox and Shelby Miller are two prospects who are seemingly primed to be able to contribute to the big league ball club in a couple years, conveniently when guys like David Freese start to get expensive and when guys like Kyle Lohse and Jake Westbrook come off the books (roughly $20 million of payroll)

 

$3.4 million dollars a year does not cripple a team from competing. If you have a good GM, he'll adapt and find a way to work around it. Over the course of 10 years that price hike does not come out to that much more money, clearly. If one win is valued at $5 million then the difference here is a player worth about a 0.7-0.9 WAR that you'd be missing out on. If you can't find someone internally for league minimum to provide that then you can probably find someone on the FA market for less than $3.4 million to provide that. It's really not that difficult to replace that production.

 

Personally I think Pujols can manage at least a 5-win season for the majority of that contract, which if that's the case then at $25.4 million you'd be getting him at just about what he's worth on a baseball diamond, if not less than what he's worth for some of that contract if he performs better than this past season, but he still has value to that city and not just to the team. He's an icon there. Or at least he was. A 38 year old Pujols was going to be lumbering around making at least $22 million had he accepted the Cards offer, so one way or the other his contract was going to end up handcuffing you no matter what when he's in his late 30's. If you're willing to play the numbers with Pujols and you understand that offering him $22 million a year might put your team in a financial bind in the future, but you're willing to go that far, you then need to decide if it's worth the extra $3.4 million to retain someone who is more to that city than just the Cardinals first baseman. Apparently it wasn't, so they lost him...

 

Because of $3.4 million dollars per year (a Ryan Theriot) and/or a .8 win player (an Aaron Miles). If you don't think that a) you can replace either of those guys internally or b) Pujols won't perform enough to makeup for the tragic loss of such a player, then I don't know what to tell you.

 

This debate feels like some weird alternate dimension where a Cubs fan is trying to justify why the Cardinals should've kept Albert Pujols, and Cardinals fans are trying to justify why they shouldn't care.

[mul21]

If you've heard their GM talk about it at all, he's said that what was offered was the max of their comfort level and even that was a bit of a stretch. There was no reason for them to potentially cripple themselves in the later years of their deal because really, who knows who will get hurt and what prospects won't pan out and they need to go sign FAs. You can't paint yourself into a corner or you end up with a season(s) like the Cubs had last year.

 

Not signing him for that dollar amount was the right move for them in a whole lot of ways.

[Clem Fandango]

If you've heard their GM talk about it at all, he's said that what was offered was the max of their comfort level and even that was a bit of a stretch. There was no reason for them to potentially cripple themselves in the later years of their deal because really, who knows who will get hurt and what prospects won't pan out and they need to go sign FAs. You can't paint yourself into a corner or you end up with a season(s) like the Cubs had last year.

 

Not signing him for that dollar amount was the right move for them in a whole lot of ways.

 

And I tend to agree. I'm not saying not signing him was a dumb business decision, I'm just a little more of the belief that you don't let once in a lifetime players go. I think Pujols' value transcended what he did on the diamond for the Cardinals and I would think that'd be worth more to the franchise. Handing out a contract like this to Pujols isn't like handing one out to the Alfonso Soriano's or Jayson Werth's of the world. Pujols is in his own stratosphere.

 

I completely understand why they didn't budge, I just think they should've bitten the bullet, and not just because I want to see their finances crippled because they're a division rival. Look at Jeter. No [expletive] way he's worth his contract, but they pay him anyways because he's Jeter. That's what Pujols is to the Cardinals. He's their patriarch. I understand the Yankees are not the Cardinals and clearly the Cardinals were not willing to budge financially... I don't know, it just seems surreal to not see Pujols in a Cardinals uniform. I guess the purist in me is a little upset. I genuinely would've liked to see Pujols play his entire career with the Cardinals. I'm not upset he's gone and out of the division, and I would've loved to have him on the Cubs, but if he went back to the Cardinals it wouldn't have upset me one iota, because Pujols staying with the Cardinals his entire career would've been good for baseball

[davearm2]

I just wonder how much money Pujols personally made for the Cardinals the last 10 years. He probably more than made up the $40 million difference and would probably have come close to that number despite declining in the later half of the

contract. The Cardinals fans act like the team isn't raking in profit year after year. Most likely they are. They could have afforded this contract IMO. How much money did they save by having Pujols on a team friendly deal the last decade? Where did that money go?

 

I personally think either the Cardinals fans are in denial or do not realize how much of an impact Albert made to the Cardinals every year. The guy wasn't just a superstar, not another Edmonds or Rolen or Holiday. He was an all time great in the making. Him being in the lineup carried some pretty mediocre offenses over the last few years. I don't think Holiday or Berkman have quite the same impact on the offense.

 

I dunno just my thoughts.

What Pujols has been for the Cardinals is not what he will be. Those days of him carrying mediocre offenses to the postseason are numbered.

 

I agree the Cards played this right. They figured out their max price, put it out there, and let the chips fall. If offering more made business sense, they would have done so. Making emotional decisions that don't make good business sense don't usually turn out well (i.e., offering well above your comfort level out of loyalty or whatever).

[UMFan83]

If you've heard their GM talk about it at all, he's said that what was offered was the max of their comfort level and even that was a bit of a stretch. There was no reason for them to potentially cripple themselves in the later years of their deal because really, who knows who will get hurt and what prospects won't pan out and they need to go sign FAs. You can't paint yourself into a corner or you end up with a season(s) like the Cubs had last year.

 

Not signing him for that dollar amount was the right move for them in a whole lot of ways.

 

We're the Cardinals going to break even or lose money if they offered $3.4 mil more? Or do the owners just not want to cut further into their profit margins?

[davearm2]

If you've heard their GM talk about it at all, he's said that what was offered was the max of their comfort level and even that was a bit of a stretch. There was no reason for them to potentially cripple themselves in the later years of their deal because really, who knows who will get hurt and what prospects won't pan out and they need to go sign FAs. You can't paint yourself into a corner or you end up with a season(s) like the Cubs had last year.

 

Not signing him for that dollar amount was the right move for them in a whole lot of ways.

 

We're the Cardinals going to break even or lose money if they offered $3.4 mil more? Or do the owners just not want to cut further into their profit margins?

It's not just about making or losing money. It's about turning dollars into wins. At some point you can buy more wins by spending the money elsewhere.

 

Not this year or next year perhaps, but over the life of the contract.

[Splendid Splinter]

If you've heard their GM talk about it at all, he's said that what was offered was the max of their comfort level and even that was a bit of a stretch. There was no reason for them to potentially cripple themselves in the later years of their deal because really, who knows who will get hurt and what prospects won't pan out and they need to go sign FAs. You can't paint yourself into a corner or you end up with a season(s) like the Cubs had last year.

 

Not signing him for that dollar amount was the right move for them in a whole lot of ways.

 

We're the Cardinals going to break even or lose money if they offered $3.4 mil more? Or do the owners just not want to cut further into their profit margins?

 

 

It's not that it's $3.4M more IMO. Pujols was offered $22M/yr from Cards and $25.4M/yr from Angels. Pujols wasn't making that much. Heck not even close. Pujols made $16M last year. Cards offered $6M more every year on top on what he made last year so for them to match the Angels... they would pay $9.4M more every year than they were used to paying Pujols. $9.4M is a big difference than $3.4M to a payroll like the Cards and add to the fact that Pujols would take up like 20-25% of it. That's why I believe Cards offered the best contract they could without killing them. I think they "probably" could've matched Angels offer, but the GM would've had to be creative in the future and also hoping that a couple of their prospects would be impact players to keep the payroll down and help Pujols out.

 

That won't happen with the Angels. With their new TV deal, they should have a high payroll the entire time. Plus Wells will be gone after 3 years, Hunter and Abreu after this year, Haren and Ervin Santana could be gone next year as well. Angels also got Bourjos/Trout/Trumbo/Walden as good cheap young players and some interesting pieces in the minors.

[rocket]

and jeff pearlman starts the smear campaign

 

http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/09/opinion/pearlman-pujols/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

 

During the waning days of last spring training, I stood alongside Pujols' table during the annual Cardinals Autograph Day at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, Florida. Admittedly, the event is one that no player enjoys; a contrived, goofy, strictly-for-the-benefit-of-the-fans labor of torturous obligation. Here is a direct, play-by-play transcript from the opening minutes:

 

Fan: "Albert, great to meet you! You're my favorite player in the world!"

 

Pujols (not looking up): "Thanks."

 

Fan 2: "Albert, do you sign jerseys?"

 

Pujols: (not looking up): "No."

 

Fan 2: "Helmets?"

 

Pujols (not looking up): "No."

 

Fan 3: "Good luck this year, Albert. You deserve everything you get."

 

Pujols (not looking up): "Uh-huh. Thanks."

 

Fan 4: "Albert, my daughter loves you."

 

Pujols (not looking up):

 

BASTARD.

[ctcf]

As someone on Reddit astutely pointed out, pity the Astros. They get a 1 year break before having to deal with Albert for another decade.

[NonProfitCow]

St. Louis is on the upper crust of mid-market teams. Out of 30 teams they've routinely ranked somewhere between the 10th or 13th highest payroll in MLB, and had the 5th highest payroll in the NL this year. Zack Cox and Shelby Miller are two prospects who are seemingly primed to be able to contribute to the big league ball club in a couple years, conveniently when guys like David Freese start to get expensive and when guys like Kyle Lohse and Jake Westbrook come off the books (roughly $20 million of payroll)

Ok? Wainwright and Carp are only signed through 2013. Molina and Berkman only through 2012. Freese is 29 and has all of 1 season's worth of PA in his career, and has been pretty much league average. They have no 2b or SS and a 2 win max CF skating by on a high BABIP. Miller is the real deal and Cox is a huge question mark. He's a 3rd baseman who OPS'd .787 in Springfield, which is a straight up launching pad. It was a highly flawed team with Pujols and will be without him.

 

$3.4 million dollars a year does not cripple a team from competing. If you have a good GM, he'll adapt and find a way to work around it. Over the course of 10 years that price hike does not come out to that much more money, clearly. If one win is valued at $5 million then the difference here is a player worth about a 0.7-0.9 WAR that you'd be missing out on. If you can't find someone internally for league minimum to provide that then you can probably find someone on the FA market for less than $3.4 million to provide that. It's really not that difficult to replace that production.

You keep throwing out the Ryan Theriot contract number for some reason, which makes no sense. It would have taken a 10 mil/year raise to match the Angels offer, which would get higher in later years since it would be backloaded. The Cardinals payroll has been right around 100 mil for the last few years. That represents at least 25% of their total roster. That's huge.

 

Personally I think Pujols can manage at least a 5-win season for the majority of that contract, which if that's the case then at $25.4 million you'd be getting him at just about what he's worth on a baseball diamond, if not less than what he's worth for some of that contract if he performs better than this past season, but he still has value to that city and not just to the team. He's an icon there. Or at least he was. A 38 year old Pujols was going to be lumbering around making at least $22 million had he accepted the Cards offer, so one way or the other his contract was going to end up handcuffing you no matter what when he's in his late 30's. If you're willing to play the numbers with Pujols and you understand that offering him $22 million a year might put your team in a financial bind in the future, but you're willing to go that far, you then need to decide if it's worth the extra $3.4 million to retain someone who is more to that city than just the Cardinals first baseman. Apparently it wasn't, so they lost him...

Pujols was a 5 win player this year. He had a damn good season too. That's how hard it is to be a 5 win guy. I personally think he would come close to matching the value of the contract overall, but it would be by being worth a couple wins more than the AAV the first few years. And you're taking a huge risk with his nagging injuries etc. The rest of the stuff you wrote is pretty much BS. He doesn't have "value to the city" or [expletive] like that. He would put butts in the seats for short spurts when he gets really close to 5-6-700 HR and 3,000 hits, but a winning team in STL is going to draw more overall. If you think you can let him walk and field a more competitive team it's worth it from a fiscal perspective. The Cards revenue stream is pretty much maxed. They pull in 3 mil at the gate every year, but can't a huge TV deal because the market simply isn't there. And again, the 3.4 mil number is nonsense.

 

Because of $3.4 million dollars per year (a Ryan Theriot) and/or a .8 win player (an Aaron Miles). If you don't think that a) you can replace either of those guys internally or b) Pujols won't perform enough to makeup for the tragic loss of such a player, then I don't know what to tell you.

 

This debate feels like some weird alternate dimension where a Cubs fan is trying to justify why the Cardinals should've kept Albert Pujols, and Cardinals fans are trying to justify why they shouldn't care.

 

QUIT IT WITH THE 3.4 MIL NONSENSE

I'm not sure you'll find a single Cardinal fan who doesn't care. It's really just like 3 groups.

 

1. I hate that greedy [expletive] he's declining blah blah blah (denial)

2. Ownership should have given him whatever he wants he's teh best raise payroll 3 million fans every year intangibles Holliday isn't worth his contract I love Jon Jay (lunatics)

3. This sucks. This is a good and bad move for both parties and neither can be blamed. Likely a good bottom line baseball move long term, but [expletive] we just lost one of the best baseball players of all time. It hurts like hell. (realists)

 

Personally, it's going to be straight up devastating to see him in an Angels uniform or realizing he's not there when we're down one with 2-3-4 due up in the 9th or a chopper gets through the hole to RF. Pujols has been a Cardinal since I was a SR in HS and he's always been there in my baseball nerdness. I hate everything right now. All my FB friends are going nuts one way or the other and have wondered why I'm not. But, I think being a message board baseball nerd is helping me out. We all walk the line of fan and pretend GM. I hate it as a fan but understand it as a pretend GM. I have no ill will against him, he's still my favorite player and will probably the greatest player of my lifetime (non Bonds division.) I'm just glad he happened to play for my favorite team in his absolute prime and thanks to current technology is got to watch him literally thousands of times.

 

But this sucks balls.

[Brian]

http://d.yimg.com/a/p/sp/getty/a1/fullj.413bf0ad45e30178f264c4f2d68ebc69/413bf0ad45e30178f264c4f2d68ebc69-getty-135465800.jpg

[RammyFanny]

I'm really happy we didn't give that kind of money/years to that ugly mug.

[El Duderino]

i thought for a second he was being elected mayor

[Brian]

He looks like pure evil here

 

http://d.yimg.com/a/p/sp/getty/28/fullj.c6e704b4a7fc176375887c1c0e3330fc/c6e704b4a7fc176375887c1c0e3330fc-getty-135465760.jpg

 

Braun really took a crap on the Angels big day.

 

http://d.yimg.com/a/p/sp/getty/ae/fullj.3ee77c6bd1e84426a4272584918d4d86/3ee77c6bd1e84426a4272584918d4d86-getty-135466114.jpg

[davearm2]

Hey CJ, maybe drop $5 of that $75M on some shoe polish. Just an idea.

[Little Slide Rooter]

He looks like pure evil here

 

http://d.yimg.com/a/p/sp/getty/28/fullj.c6e704b4a7fc176375887c1c0e3330fc/c6e704b4a7fc176375887c1c0e3330fc-getty-135465760.jpg

 

 

Would a good man do such as awful thing to the best fans in the world?

[Splendid Splinter]

Hey CJ, maybe drop $5 of that $75M on some shoe polish. Just an idea.

 

 

LOL I was thinking the same thing. These guys got millions. You think they could afford to buy brand new shoes for something like this or at least get them cleaned up nicely. Then again... CJ's shoes could be the "vintage" look.

[El Duderino]

What the hell, they look like they're completely covered in dust. How is that even possible

[UMFan83]

I'm used to seeing him in red and white so it doesn't really look too odd to see him in an Angels jersey.

[Mark Priors Calves]

The jersey over a suit is such a silly look.

[Careless]

A friend of mine (who is an extreme mathematician/stats guy) posted this in a note... makes you wonder. My boss thinks that there was something going on behind the scenes and that Pujols and Cardinals ownership/upper management didn't get along as well as it seemed, especially after seeing Holiday get his contract.

 

Typing in the 210 million the Cards offered into the "Cost of Living Wizard" at Salary.com, it says word-for-word: "The cost of living in Anaheim, CA is 31.9% higher than in St. Louis, MO. Therefore, you would have to earn a salary of $277,084,723 to maintain your current standard of living."

 

Albert didn't hit 277 - he settled for $254 mil in Anaheim. Doing the reverse calculation with the Anaheim dollars, you get $192,504,298 St. Louis dollars. But the Cards offered $210 mil! So Albert left more than 17 million dollars on the table from what he was already offered by the Cardinals to take off for LA.

The regional "cost of living" is things like housing, food, taxes, and other things like that. Aside from taxes and housing (and housing is effectively an optional expense at this income level, Pujols certainly could afford to live using .1% of his income on housing there), they're not things that factor into the absolute income level of people making $25 million.

 

IOW, Pujols isn't spending $2.2 million on food in STL and $2.8 million in Anaheim. He also isn't going to spend $6 million or whatever the average percentage would be on his mortgage+property taxes.

 

Cost of living is a sort of a floor. Relevant for people with low (but not too low), middle, and mid-high incomes, but just meaningless for people making 8 figures.

Edited December 11, 2011 by Careless

[Little Slide Rooter]

The jersey over a suit is such a silly look.

 

They've found that dress shirts and coats don't tend to fit as well over the jersey.

[JonJayCutler]

I'm used to seeing him in red and white so it doesn't really look too odd to see him in an Angels jersey.

 

I agree, seeing him in pinstripes would be a lot stranger. Couple the similar uniform with the fact that it's the Angels and you have a pretty anti-climactic ending to the whole Pujols deal, other than him no longer being a Cardinal.

[Have a seat, Neifi]

Holy crap, is this true? If so, the Cardinals front office is even more out of touch than I thought.

 

It probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway because the Angels blew away the competition with their 10-year, $254 million contract offer to Albert Pujols, but it’s now being revealed that the Cardinals’ higher-ups made a number of odd decisions in their negotiations for the first baseman and franchise icon.

 

Like, for instance, offering him a five-year, $130 million contract as a starting point this winter, down from the nine-year, $198 million bid that was made last spring. And refusing to match the Angels’ 10-year personal services contract that will keep Pujols a member of the Anaheim organization in some capacity for at least the next 20 years.

 

Maybe these were calculated steps by the Cardinals front office. Perhaps they determined at some point this past season that they didn’t want to get locked into a 10-year deal with a 32-year-old first baseman — which, by most analyses, would be a more-than-reasonable business decision. But the shrewdness may have pushed Albert away, giving him all the more self-justification to chase the highest dollar amount.

 

http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2011/12/11/cardinals-strategy-in-pujols-talks-was-odd-maybe-insulting/