Actually, it was good for the Padres to sign Eric Hosmer to a seemingly nonsensical contract

If you’re familiar with my ghoulish internet persona, you probably know I don’t need a lot of help laughing at the Padres. It comes naturally to me, and I probably shouldn’t attend any parties in San Diego, because I’ll just sit in the corner with a stupid grin on my face, ready for any excuse to talk about the Padres retiring Steve Garvey’s number. So sad. So hilarious.

Also, I won’t be invited to any parties in San Diego. It’s better for everyone.

The Eric Hosmer contract, then, is the perfect content for my Padres-mocking needs. They lost 91 games last year, but when you look at expected record (based on runs scored and allowed), it’s possible that they deserved to lose over 100. They had a bad roster, and now that bad roster has Hosmer. And Freddy Galvis. They got a good-not-great player at great-not-good money, and they’ll probably flail around in his prime years. The best part might be where the expensive free agent plays the same position as the player they recently locked up for lots of money, and they’ll move the incumbent to the outfield, where he hasn’t been very good.

As such, it is our duty on the internet to roast the Padres for this strange deal. I’ll start: The Hosmer contract is like a lost verse of “Eleanor Rigby.”

Except I’m going to zag instead of zig, and not just for the hot takes. The more I think about this deal, the more I’m on board. It’s extremely unlikely Hosmer helps the Padres win in 2018, but that shouldn’t be the only thing we look at. We’ve gotten sucked into this idea that free agents are only for win-now teams. They’re the ones who will get value out of the front end of a contract. They’re the ones who should risk the bloated payments for an unproductive player at the back end of a contract. Only win-now teams. Other teams shouldn’t bother.

Makes sense, except I have a question: What else were the Padres going to do with the money over the next few years? The draft and international free agent market have been rigged to prevent extra spending. A team with a $100 million budget and a $1 million payroll doesn’t have an obvious way to spend the $99 million in savings. Owners tend to put that under the mattress, and we’ve gotten really used to thinking that’s a good thing.

We’re also used to thinking of contracts in binary terms, good or bad. An underpaid player makes a contract Good. A player who’s signed for too many years at too much money is Bad. We can argue which one of those applies to a Hosmer contract of eight years and $144 million that’s front-loaded with an opt-out clause, except we would be missing a larger point. Let’s say it’s a Bad contract.

What are the negative consequences for the Padres having Hosmer on a regrettable contract?

They pay too much money to a player who isn’t productive

So what? What does that prevent them from doing?

Locking up some of their young players to extensions.

They don’t have any candidates for contracts like that right now.

The Hosmer deal makes it less likely that they’ll sign a star like Bryce Harper or Manny Machado

They probably aren’t getting those players anyway. But Hosmer’s contract certainly won’t prevent them from another big contract or three. They’re currently paying the rest of the roster $16.50/hr., though they also get an employee discount on merchandise. The Hosmer contract isn’t one that puts them at maximum payroll, and it isn’t really close.

The Hosmer deal makes it less likely that they can sign another free agent for a lot of money.

Except we’ve already established if they do that, we’ll probably roast the Padres for wasting money.

Really, the only negative effect this contract will have is that maybe the Padres won’t have enough money to spend on targeted free agents to help a contending roster in the future. It’s possible the 2021 Padres will need a third baseman and only a third baseman, but they’ll be paying all this money to Hosmer, so they’ll have to shop at yard sales instead of Nordstrom. By arguing against this contract, you’re arguing that the Padres were better off saving that money for a specific set of circumstances that might not ever exist.

That’s the downside. The upside is that the Padres will have Hosmer play baseball for them until that hypothetical contending team gets here, and he’s pretty good at baseball.

Hosmer pushes the team closer to contention, even if he’s not enough to get them there on his own, but there’s also a chance that the opposite version of the doomsday scenario happens. That is, it’s possible that the 2021 Padres will need a first baseman, and Hosmer will already be in place, kicking butt. It’s possible that the 2019 Padres will need exactly this player.

If you’re looking for a historical example, consider the 2004 Tigers, who signed a 32-year-old Pudge Rodriguez, then came back the next year and added a very expensive Magglio Ordóñez. The internet was laughing. Oh, how the internet was laughing. The Tigers were going to lose 90 to 120 games for the next decade, and they were dumping the money down a storm drain for over-30 players? For what? For whom?

When the Tigers were ready to be good again, just two years later, they had two all-stars in place to help them win the pennant. The internet had moved on to laughing at other things, like cats riding invisible bicycles. The Padres do have one of the best farm systems in baseball, you know. We don’t have to be talking about the 2021 Padres. Every team is always a couple of developmental success stories away from a pennant.

It’s true that Hosmer is a lot closer to Wally Moon and Wally Joyner than Willie McCovey and Willie Stargell, so there are reasons to avoid proclaiming this to be a steal. But here’s what I like about it:

And as a kid who used to run downstairs and check for Jack Clark and Chili Davis in the Chronicle‘s tally of National League leaders every morning (“Heck yes, eighth in RBI!”), I know the value of having at least one really cool, really good player on even the worst teams. I know the pride that comes with wearing that guy’s t-shirt and pretending you’re him in a backyard home run derby.

I have never pretended I was “Ron Fowler, but incrementally richer” in a backyard home run derby.

So the Padres are better and more watchable, and the downside is that maybe this deal will hamstring them a little when they’re good again? In that worst-case scenario, the Padres are good again. It seems like this is a hard deal to screw up.

Not that the Padres won’t try, mind you. They’re still baseball’s most roastable team, and they’ll probably step on a few more rakes before they’re contending again. But I was skeptical about the Hosmer deal. Then I thought about it, and it turns out that teams with scores of extra millions to spend should spend some of that money on talented players, even if they aren’t exactly ready to contend yet.

It seems like a wild concept. It shouldn’t be.