Albert Pujols’ Angels Contract Worth $250 Million

You probably don’t’ care about this stuff in June, so you sure as heck don’t care about it in January, but here’s the point: Man, the American League is stacked at first base. It’s unlikely that Pujols, Fielder, Gonzalez, and Teixeira will all make the Hall of Fame, but they’ve certainly had Hall-worthy peaks, and now they’re all in the same league. I’d wager those are four of the game’s five best first basemen, and I’d give Hosmer and/or Santana (when he stops catching completely) decent odds of cracking that top five sometime soon.

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Last month, I wrote a feature here at Baseball Nation saying that Albert Pujols would be worth his huge 10-year contract and be productive until he’s 40:

Pujols is a first-ballot Hall of Famer who might end his career as the greatest righthanded hitter in the history of the game. If he never played another game, he’d still be a first-ballot Hall of Famer off his performance to date.I still believe this is true and that Pujols will be that once-in-a-generation player who will be productive at age 40. But reading the details of exactly what Pujols will be paid gave me a little pause:

That turns out to be mostly correct, according to this tweet from Bob Nightengale:

One would hope that Angels owner Arte Moreno would give Pujols a bit more than ten dollars for personal services, but maybe he’s not a good tipper. (Kidding, Arte!)

Soon thereafter, details of Wilson’s contract emerged. He will earn $10 million in 2012, and then his salary climbs all the way up to $20 million in 2016. It is, therefore, heavily backloaded.

And so, it turns out, is Albert Pujols’ contract. From Jerry Crasnick:

“When it all came down, I was mad. I was mad at God because I felt like all the signs that had been played out through the baseball field, our foundation, our restaurant, the Down Syndrome Center, my relationships, my home, my family close,” Deidre Pujols told the station. “I mean, we had no reason, not one reason, to want to leave. People were deceived by the numbers.“Actually, Deidre Pujols was mad at more than just God. She was mad because, according to her, the Cardinals had originally offered only a five-year deal:

“When you have somebody say ‘We want you to be a Cardinal for life’ and only offer you a five-year deal, it kind of confused us,” Deidre Pujols said. “Well, we got over that insult and felt like Albert had given so much of himself to baseball and into the community ... we didn’t want to go through this again.“I dunno. Things like that in baseball are usually called “negotiations”. The team starts low -- of course, they want to save money -- and the sides go back and forth. Instead of doing that, the Pujols camp decided to be “insulted”. Bernie Miklasz of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch summed it up pretty well on Monday:

Since I know some of you don’t get up until noon most days, here’s a little bit on NPR from Friday morning, wherein we wonder if Albert Pujols is really worth $250 million.

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Two weeks ago, Dan Le Batard of The Miami Herald reported that the Marlins, among several other teams, believe Albert Pujols is older than his stated age of 31. It was not the main thrust of his column—indeed, he mentioned it almost in passing.

Not long before that, ESPN’s Keith Law* remarked in an online chat that

Saturday, at 11:30am local time, both Pujols and Wilson will be formally introduced in an Angels Stadium news conference. There had been talk that the players would get separate news conferences. They will get the same news conference.

What follows are selected minutes from the conference.

But the teams around baseball had a much different day. They had to get a to-do list going and focus on their new priorities now that Albert Pujols was on the Los Angeles Angels. Here are brief snippets from those to-do lists:

Tigers - Get lawyers to send out cease-and-desist letters to anyone who refers to Pujols as the game’s best-hitting first baseman.

Saturday’s going to be just another beautiful day in Anaheim, California. I’m guessing. Sunny, without a cloud in the sky, with a whiff of the sea in the breeze, and maybe, just maybe, if you open your ears and close your mouth, you’ll be able to hear the distant, jovial screams from the Matterhorn.

Checking Weather.com...yep, yeah, just as I suspected. Sunny, 67, with a zero percent chance of rain. It’s a hell of a forecast, and a hell of a regular forecast, which we shouldn’t expect to change unless Arte Moreno decides that he wants it to. Arte Moreno controls the weather in Anaheim. It’s this whole big thing, I’m surprised you didn’t know.

The degree of the other teams’ interest was unclear. It felt like the Cardinals were still the heavy favorites. But the Angels engaged Pujols’ agent in lengthy talks on Wednesday, and late in the night, ESPN’s Jayson Stark concluded an update column with the following paragraph:

I woke up and I was behind. Way behind. The Albert Pujols sweepstakes were over, and the Angels had won. The Angels had also won Wilson, but on this morning, the top free agent starter signing a contract was secondary news, because arguably the top hitter in baseball had also signed a contract to leave the only team he’d ever known.

The Rangers’ ownership is not as petty as I am, apparently. They’re fiscally prudent and pragmatic. And if they didn’t think that Pujols was worth $254 million -- which is something that 28 other teams thought -- well, they might be right. But they were always the best fit for one of the two premium first basemen on the market, considering that they have a modest payroll, and that they shouldn’t be especially attached to Mitch Moreland.

It would be wrong to say that the Rangers should sign Fielder because it’s an arms race now. A couple of moves from a rival shouldn’t put the Rangers into reactionary mode, especially if the long-term consequences are so significant. But even when you strip the emotions away, the Rangers and Fielder are just about a perfect fit. Consider:

And he will be a member of the Angels through the year 2021, which is so far in the future that you have to put “the year” in front of it; it’s only 42 years before Zefram Cochrane will invent the warp drive, for example.

Craig Calcaterra of Hardball Talk posits that in the last few years of this deal, the Angels will regret it, because, well:

Kendrys Morales hit a grand slam on that pitch, and then he fractured his leg when he jumped on home plate to celebrate. That pitch is the reason that Albert Pujols signed a 10-year, $250 million contract on Thursday. Well, it is if you make some major assumptions, but follow me down the rabbit hole.

The first assumption is that the Angels wouldn’t have pursued Albert Pujols if Morales were healthy and productive. That’s not necessarily true. It’s not like the Angels were committed to filling their first-base hole with the best-available free agent and, say, turns out the best-available guy was pretty good. No, Pujols was a target because of his name, his brand, his marketing cache. The Angels know that Pujols already is one of the greatest hitters of all time, and that his name on the back of jerseys, and said in a baritone voice promoting Angels broadcasts, are things that will help make back some of what they’re giving to him. They could have gone after Pujols regardless.

Before that, it was all rainbows and unicorns and helpful leprechauns. But since Game 6 went so terribly wrong, the Rangers have gone from almost World Champions to (now) second place in the American League West.

Let’s just work through the basic math, though. Maybe this isn’t as serious as we think.

I don’t know Allen Craig, but he’s no Albert Pujols, and if St. Louis has to go down yet another step to replace Pujols in their lineup, they will be a significantly worse offensive team than they were in 2011, when they led the NL in runs scored with 762.

Those two NL Central teams both won 90 or more games and made the postseason in 2011, and both will be teams with less offense in 2012. That alone would help the fortunes of the four (and in 2013, only three) other teams in the division.

When the Rangers traded Rodriguez away, though, they actually paid for the privilege. They paid $67 million to the New York Freaking Yankees to take away the best player on the team. Amazing.

Even more amazing: Rodriguez had an opt-out clause of his ridiculous contract, and he used it to get an even more ridiculous contract: ten years, $275 million, with up to $30 million in marketing bonuses as he approaches the all-time home run record. Rodriguez is still owed a minimum of $143 million over the next six seasons, and his production is drooping. His OPS is down over 200 points from its peak, and he’s missed time with injuries for the fourth season in a row.

And according to Buster Olney as well:

There has been no official announcement of this deal yet, just the tweets, but obviously we will have much more here at Baseball Nation later.

Realistically, Pujols is probably still most likely to re-sign. We don’t know anything about the third team, and I’m going to go ahead and assume that it isn’t a serious threat. It seems like this is down to the Angels and the Cardinals, and the Cardinals are the Cardinals. They’re Pujols’ Cardinals. But nothing’s guaranteed in these crazy days we’re living in. Nothing. (Nothing.)

You fool. You naive, ignorant fool.

The Cardinals definitely feel like the favorites. Pujols, obviously, has strong ties, and there’s the familiarity factor. Yesterday, the Marlins looked like the Cardinals’ only serious competition, and now the Marlins are out. But. But?

That is a very subjective tweet. Capozzi deduces that people in a hotel think the Marlins are the favorites to sign Albert Pujols. There’s nothing scientific about it. But take a step back and think about where we are.

That’s ridiculous!

Marlins pres David Samson says: “There will NOT be a free agent signed that includes a no-trade clause.” So team sticking with policy.If Pujols were to re-sign with the Cardinals, he would have de facto protection from a trade as a 10/5 player -- a player who has been in the league for ten years, and with the same team for at least the last five. The Marlins would need to write any no-trade protection into a Pujols contract, which they’re apparently unwilling to do. And if they didn’t do it for Reyes, there’s a bit of a precedent for the team not caving on this particular policy.

Pujols’s fear is crazy, though. It’s not like the Marlins are going to go all wacky in free agency and then turn around and trade everyone after a year or two, right? What sort of team would do that?

In truth, Pujols appears to have a very limited number of suitors. At least for the time being. And Pujols’ agent, Dan Lozano, has met or is meeting with all of them Monday. First, from Ken Rosenthal:

Next, from Clark Spencer:

By birth, I am a Missourian. My father’s family goes way back in southwest Missouri; my mother’s family goes way back in southeast Missouri. I was born in the middle of the state. So I think of Missouri, and particularly the southern half of the state, as my tribal homeland.

My uncle’s response: