The Chris Moeller Archives

Sign the man already!

The St. Louis Cardinals are only two days away from a very important date in the history of their franchise. February 15th is the deadline for contract negotiations between the club and Albert Pujols' agent Dan Lozano. Pujols, consistent with his negotiation guidelines of past seasons, does not wish to have his baseball season distracted by contract talks. If a long-term deal cannot be worked out by Tuesday, when the Cardinals' spring training in Florida begins, Pujols will plan to file for free agency at the conclusion of the 2011 season in the fall.

Albert Pujols' new salary is expected to reach historic proportions in the baseball business. When I went to type that sentence, I first had it that his new salary would "break the bank," but when I saw it written, I realized how inaccurate it was-- that breaking the bank implies it's more than there is for the club to spend. This is far from the case. This is only what the Cardinals would like their fans to believe.

Per average ticket price, a Cardinals game at Busch Stadium is the third most expensive to attend in all of baseball. Though they play in one of the smaller television markets in the league, their cable TV deal is a regional package involving one of the league's few truly "national" teams in terms of fan following, and in local TV ratings, Cardinals broadcasts in their home city are tops in baseball. Despite three decades of uncharted growth in popularity-- both in terms of attendance (4th highest in MLB in 2010) and television revenue, the construction of a new taxpayer-supported ballpark, four playoff appearances, two pennants, a World Championship, and a record-breaking growth in league profit boosted by internet revenue, licensing, the new MLB Network, and the last new national TV deal involving FOX, TBS, and ESPN, the Cardinals' team payroll has dropped from the seventh highest in the league in 2003 to #13 in 2010, almost out of the top half of the 30 clubs, and now behind the Minnesota Twins, a team that was targeted for contraction as recently as 2002 and that has not won a playoff game since 2004, or a playoff series since 2002.

Since his debut in 2001, Albert Pujols, while being a model citizen of near-Musial-proportions and a popular community figure off the field, has also been a model of consistency and reliability on the field, as well as that field's top overall player. He's won three of the last six MVP awards handed out by the National League, finishing among the top nine all 10 years, the top four nine times, and in the top two seven of those first ten seasons, which is flat-out ridiculous. He's the only player ever to bat at least .300, hit 30+ home runs, and drive in 100+ runs for each of his first ten seasons (and counting). He's a career .322 hitter with 13 home runs in 56 post-season games and 199 at-bats. He won a pair of Gold Gloves, an MVP award for the NL Championship Series ('04), league awards named for Hank Aaron (twice), Roberto Clemente, and Lou Gehrig, and the Major League Baseball Player of the Year award three times. He won the first "Decade Triple Crown" in the National League since Rogers Hornsby in the 1920's.

Yet during no part of that first decade in the big leagues has Albert Pujols ever been among the top ten highest paid players in the game. By at least 2009, with industry growth leading to even more large contracts, he'd fallen out of the top 25. The whole baseball world knows what Albert Pujols did for the Cardinals during those 10 years. He rewrote their record books and made some very unathletic men in the front office very rich. Now what are those men prepared to do for him during his second decade?

Do the Cardinals have the necessary money to spend in this "new economy"? You tell me. We'll measure two three-year periods. The Cardinals had a terrific run of success from 2004-2006: They played in two World Series ('04, '06), winning one ('06), and finishing two wins short of playing in a third ('05). From 2008-2010, the Philadelphia Phillies played in two World Series ('08, '09), winning one ('08), and finishing two wins short of playing in a third ('10). Identical.

In 2003, before this all started for either club (although the Cards had already won three divisions in a row), the Philadelphia Phillies' payroll was $95,338,704. The Cardinals' was at $101,825,848. By 2010, the Phillies payroll had increased to $141,928,379. The Cardinals, despite their well-publicized claims of a stretched budget, of having to practically have the office staff donate plasma to get Matt Holliday signed as line-up protection for Pujols, had seen their payroll drop to $93,540,751. Where is all of this new money going? We're not talking about competing with the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, or Cubs here. We're talking about the Phillies. From Philadelphia. It's a stagnating industrial city like St. Louis. And of course, which of these two teams is now the front-runner in the National League for 2011? Hint: the one that has already added to their arsenal the pick of the free agent crop this winter, left-handed pitcher Cliff Lee. The best gets better. The Phillies use their success to invest more, not as an excuse to scale back.

Pujols and Lozano reportedly want $30 million per year for 10 years for the player, which would be an MLB record, although the $30 million annum would still be less than what Alex Rodriguez makes, at least for the first, overlapping part of the two contracts. Since winning the 2006 Series, Cardinals fans have seen the quality of player surrounding the Pujols nucleus deteriorate to the point that the Cincinnati Reds were capable of rising up and winning the division title in 2010. The Cards still claim "tough times" on payroll flexibility, but they knew this was coming, and frankly, it's disrespectful to even push the man into the free agent market after all he's accomplished and meant to the team's "brand," even if they think the most well-heeled clubs, like the Yankees and the Red Sox, would be out of the auction bidding at the end of the year. (And by the way, if Baltimore Orioles GM Andy MacPhail is truthful in his recent claims that the O's would be effectively out of the bidding for Pujols at the 10 yr, $300 million price tag, there is collusion at play here again in the league. Orioles fans should sue that fool if he was actually unwilling to make such a move for Pujols that would utterly transform their shitty team.)

Pujols' remarkable ability has enabled the Cardinals to field a less than competitive team around him since winning the World Series. They've been able to field a team good enough to contend with the likes of the Cubs and the Reds in the Central Division, and good enough to keep the Busch Stadium turnstiles spinning, but it's been well below the marked improvement of the Phillies, who are now much better than they were almost a decade ago, $50 million or so better, and along with the Champion Giants, the class of the league. The Cardinals have failed to win even a playoff game since taking the '06 title, appearing only once in '09. Remember, if the Cardinals added Pujols, the heart and soul of their franchise, at $30 million a year going forward, they wouldn't even be adding $30 million to what's already there. He's already due $14.5 million for the final year of his contract in '11 so they're only adding another $15 million to the existing books-- still well below the ascendant levels in recent years of the Phillies, not to mention the Cubs and the Mets of the league, who are both also over at least the $130,000,000 level.

The St. Louis newspaper has now been publishing articles debating Pujols' actual value-- today even comparing his financial worth to "the average working men and women" in the St. Louis area. That's a pretty old-fashioned, and frankly desperate argument to employ on behalf of the Cardinals' public relations machine. I thought the "average man" argument went out with Babe Ruth when it was reported in 1930 that he made more money than President Hoover and the Babe famously remarked, "I had a better year than he did." Albert Pujols is expected to make more money. To say nothing of the all the red and white t-shirt and jersey-clad fans that descend on dormant downtown St. Louis 81 of the 365 days of the year for the purpose of seeing him play, he competes in a business that has solidarity in contract bargaining, and one in which even the wild success of the industry does not lead to an increase in the number of employment positions available. Those limited employment positions are bound to become increasingly valuable and lucrative to the most accomplished of those position-holders. (Now raising his taxes accordingly is another matter altogether.)

When a for-profit sports team implies that one of its players is being greedy during negotiations, a certain dim-witted segment of the fan population is bound to take its side regardless of the facts, especially in a smaller-size city in which the athletes are the biggest, most visible, and therefore, most polarizing celebrities in town, but I've got to even shake my head in disgust when I read comment after comment online now about how "greedy" Albert Pujols is behaving, and how Stan Musial would have never done what he's doing. The newspaper eggs them on. The Post-Dispatch published a separate article this week with a stupid headline promoting the fact that Albert Pujols, under his new hypothetical contract, would be making more money per plate appearance than Stan the Man made during any one of his three MVP seasons. Of course, Stan's long playing career ended when John F. Kennedy was still President, and his MVP seasons were during the '40s. This article is so stunningly asinine as far as any modern insight into determining financial value, I don't even know where to begin with it, except to present it to you as something baseball players always have to contend with when dealing with a sports media that values its access to the team-owned clubhouse above all else.

The Cardinals may be attempting to swing a shorter-length deal on the guaranteed money, negotiations are a natural part of the process, and I haven't lost my general optimism that Pujols will wind up playing his entire storied career in St. Louis, but part of the reason for that optimism has been because I still see this as such a no-brainer for the club. Never has there been a more deserving player, perhaps, but more importantly, never has there ever been a more deserving player that provided less financial risk. His durability, consistency, and character-- the key traits for any long financial commitment-- are his hallmarks.

There have been suggestions of late-- probably correct-- that Cardinals fans would split down the middle in blaming player or team if the marriage between the two ends after the 2011 season, but for sure there will be an irrevocable split between me and the fans who hold Albert Pujols accountable if he doesn't get the contract he has coming to him. If they see Albert as the anti-Musial, they're missing the picture completely. Stan, quite famously at the time, became the first $100,000 a year player later in his career (after the 17th of his 23 years, to be exact), and today, that earned contract is part of the historical record of his greatness. This new proposed contract for Pujols is a precise equivalent. The dollar figures are definitely different, but nothing else is. Like Pujols, Musial got the big contract after what may have been the prime of his career, but when he was still the league's elite player. That contract was earned, not just because of the hits, runs, and runs batted in, but also because Musial the Man personified what the Cardinals wanted to be known for as a team. If the Cardinals take this final step in making Albert Pujols the personification of their club and of this generation of club ownership, they will have put themselves in the front seat of American sports teams in class and prestige. Albert Pujols is worth exactly that.

posted by CM @ 11:41 AM