I just saw an episode on my local TV of "The Lineup," a NY-centric panel show of self-important experts opining about NY sports—this panel was on Greatest NY Deals, or something of the sort, and two featured deals concerned the acquisitions of Catfish Hunter by the Yankees in 1975 and Pedro Martinez by the Mets thirty years later. 

Both deals, and both pitchers’ careers, bear a certain superficial resemblance: after multiple Cy Young-level seasons for championship franchises, each was signed to a mega-bux contract by a middling but ambitious NY franchise as a major number-1 ace-type, each had a good first season that wasn’t quite up to his previous peak, a second year that was considerably less stellar and the rest of his career that was a major disappointment. Both signings were described (on the panel show, and by fans of each team generally) as "successful" signings because of the teams’ success and the psychological impact each pitcher brought to his team: his leadership, his charisma, his professionalism, and his example to younger teammates of how a gamer plays.

While not dismissing that such qualities are real, my cold take on all this is to ask if people who spout this stuff have lost their minds. Consider if, instead, each of them had signed as a first-round rookie-draft pick (or as a Japanese League pitcher, or something) and then had the career he had in New York. It seems beyond question that they would have both been vying for the title of "Biggest Flash-in-the-Pan Disappointment" in NY pitching history, rather than Biggest Signing. They signed for such tremendous money that on a dollar-per-win basis, both of them would have trouble breaking even if they had multiple 20-win seasons for their new teams, much less a series of records like 9-8 and 5-6 and 9-9. Hunter went 63-53 over five seasons with the Yankees, and Martinez went 32-23 in four seasons with the Mets, 12-10 and 8-6 roughly: not what you normally shell out super-star salaries to get.

So since the teams and fans and analysts make these "successful" signings, we need to ask: what is charisma and leadership and professionalism truly worth?

Hunter’s and Martinez’s advocates cite their Falstaffian value in attracting other, better, free agents to sign with their new teams. (Falstaff said that he was "not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.") Did Carlos Beltran sign with the Mets because he saw how serious they were about winning after signing Pedro, as Reggie Jackson was alleged to have done after Hunter’s signing three decades earlier? We’ll never know how much psychology, as opposed to cold cash considerations, entered into Carlos’ or Reggie’s head, but I will remind you that free-agent signings are inherently risky business: some of the free agents lured by a Martinez or a Hunter turn out to be other, worser free agents. Beltran and Reggie worked out nicely, it’s true, but that’s ignoring the other, ruinous or idiotic free-agent signings that might also have been engendered by Pedro’s or Catfish’s presence on the roster. It’s not quite fair to look at someone whose primary value consists of inducing further free-agents signings as an unalloyed virtue. If you could find a stellar free-agent who didn’t sign with a team (thereby saving the team money to re-sign their own players, or to acquire other stars), does he then get the credit for those signings?

Moving from pitching to hitting, there’s a current example of a successful mega-bux signing that on a purely baseball level would appear to be a disastrous mistake, that of Jason Heyward by the Cubs. You can’t argue with success, but I guess that’s what I’m prepared to do.  Heyward had an awful 2016 by any standard, except one: the Cubs won the World Series, so all is forgiven, and they might win yet in 2017, despite Heyward’s disappointing performance so far. Let’s assume for a moment that Heyward never improves, and remains a 20-million-dollar mediocrity in right field for the remainder of his contract, a good-field no-hit RFer who is actually worth about a tenth of his salary. As of today, his OPS is up to the low 700s, his OPS+ in the high 80s, obviously not what you expect from your 28-million-dollar corner outfielder in Wrigley.

So, going on the assumption that he’s never going to get much better, can his signing ever be justified on grounds other than the quality of his play?  That is, can the Cubs find such virtues in his leadership, his effort, his intangible qualities that outweigh Heyward’s mediocre performance on the field? Can Heyward’s presence in the lineup, poor as it may be, still make other players think "The Cubs are a quality organization, paying Heyward and others very well,  and even their weaker positions such as RF are manned by fundamentally decent players, so it’s a team worth signing with"?

I’m not talking about spin here. Obviously, few clubs are going to fess up to signing a current player at top dollar who’s playing way below his potential. Clubs are always going to mouth the "intangibles" line, point to his stellar qualities that don’t show up in the stats-line, and fans are always going to buy into that PR BS whether it's true or not. As David Puddy says, "Gotta support the team!"

But to what extent do other players, particularly other free agents, buy into this? Is a free agent going to factor into his decision to sign or not-sign with the Cubs, Jason Heyward’s presence in the lineup? Is it a factor, a non-factor, or a negative factor in the decision? Just from the perspective of signing other outfielder free agents, I imagine they view one outfield spot on the Cubs as fully occupied for the next few years whatever Heyward’s productivity will be: I doubt if they will pay Heyward’s salary so he can sit on the bench, no matter how poorly he bats.

Obviously, Heyward has virtues as a player (his defense, his intelligence, his clubhouse speechifying)—I’m not looking to run him down, or to jump on the bandwagon while he’s playing poorly, or is injured, or is dealing with the world’s worst extended slump, or anything of the sort. What I’m asking is whether it’s a serious factor in the minds of free agents which other free-agent signings the club has made of players whose virtue is largely inspirational.  Is it worth it to pursue veteran free-agents to sign huge, long-term contracts if their health or their age concerns you?

181 million (Heyward’s contract) could have been spent very usefully elsewhere, as could Pedro’s or Catfish’s contract, and I wonder how much of the praise these players get for their intangibles is simply the clubs’ and the fans’ attempts to save face. Any signing could of course blow up in your face: players have careers ending suddenly with no warning signs all the time  ("cough—Jason Bay Robbie Alomar—cough"), and this result is always a chance you take, that a long-term contract will turn out poorly.  

Or even a short-term one: before free-agency, teams sometimes signed veteran stars to one-year contracts, at salaries that are now laughably below a fraction of minimum-pay but then were ruinously high, and sometimes that worked out very well for the team, even when the veteran star put up disappointing numbers. One example that sticks in my mind (and my craw) is the Cardinals’ signing of Roger Maris for the 1967 and 1968 seasons: the party line on Maris’s signing is that it was brilliant. The Cards, after all, won the pennant in both of Maris’s seasons with the team, and won the World Series in 1967. A better outcome could hardly be imagined.

The only thing you could criticize in the signing of Maris was that his numbers weren’t very good, even for 1968, and that his salary was the highest (or the second-highest) on the team.  (Tim McCarver and Lou Brock, whose salaries combined to equal Maris’s team-leading salary in 1967, compiled over three times Maris’s WAR. By the next year, Gibson had been raised to $10,000 more than Maris, but his WAR was nearly five times what Maris’s was.) Other than that, it was a blindingly brilliant move. But I would make the case, a very hard one to make because of the end result, that the Cardinals won the pennant both years despite the presence of Maris in their lineup, not because of it.  This might be easier to see if they had had Maris on the roster from the beginning of his professional career in 1953 to the very end in 1968. In that case, we might judge their nurturing of Maris’s career to have been brilliant, especially given his stellar play in the early 1960s, but acquiring Maris at the age of 32? Maybe not so good.  

The fact that the Cards did win, after not winning in 1965 and 1966, and Maris played regularly for them when they won, forces the conclusion that it was a brilliant, and cost-effective, signing, except I don’t really see it that way. Sometimes teams make colossal costly errors and win anyway. Certainly we can point to disasters NOT of a team’s deliberate making that teams have overcome: most championship teams suffer some sort of ruinous injury to a key player, for example, that they manage to overcome. We’d never say the 1986 Mets did well to lose Mookie Wilson for much of the 1986 season, for example, or the Braves brilliantly plotted to have Billy Bruton and Joe Adcock injured for most of 1957, or that the Dodgers wisely replaced Tommy Davis with Lou Johnson in 1965. Teams overcome ruinous injuries to win championships routinely, yet we’d never say that they planned them or wanted them—they simply dealt with them. So it is with stars playing beneath their potential, disappointing problems that some teams manage to overcome, only the teams and their fans and apologists will offer excuses as to why that player actually contributed to the team’s success far more than the numbers show. I don’t buy it.

Why do we resist as fiercely as we do the elegant conclusion that a team’s choice works out very poorly, yet the team still wins the championship, as Maris’s Cards and Heyward’s Cubs and Hunter’s Yanks and (almost) Pedro’s Mets, have done? Instead of concluding, "Yeah, the numbers don’t look so hot, but the team won, so the signing was a huge success despite the numbers," why don’t we conclude, "Yeah, that was a messed-up move, but the other 24 players compensated for that dropped card" (or cub or yank or met)?  Victory has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan.