Nick Johnson's Tremendous Free Agent Value: Could He Fit With Cubs?

Nick Johnson is good at baseball.

In 2009, Johnson played 133 games, the first time since 2006 that he had topped the 130 mark. He posted a line of .291/.426/.405, including a ridiculous .279/.477/.413 after a midseason trade from the Washington Nationals to the Florida Marlins.

He walked more times (99) than he struck out (84), the third straight season in which he has done so.

In fact, Johnson has a lucrative and exceptionally valuable pair of abilities: He swings at nothing outside the strike zone (2009 chase rate a bit over 14 percent, or roughly half of the league average), and he makes contact with nearly everything he does swing at (contact rate last year was around 86 percent, about 10 percent better than the league average).

On top of that, he has a remarkable and uncanny ability of not falling behind in the count. The percentage of first pitches that went for strikes against Johnson in 2009 was just under 48 percent, right in line with his career rate of about 50 percent, but some 17 percent better than the league average.

Johnson, who will turn 32 near the end of next season, plays an adequate but below-average first base. His primary value is and always will be offensive. For a first baseman, the traditional knock against him has gone; he has not nearly enough power.

While he did hit just eight homers last year, Johnson's career rate of 25.7 at-bats per home run entering 2009 was a respectable figure.

Given that Johnson reaches base so feverishly though, he doesn't need to provide that much power to have value. In his last three healthy seasons, he finished sixth, fourth and second in the National League in on-base percentage.

The left-handed hitter has even more value because of another extremely rare skill: He can hit left-handed pitching. In fact, Johnson's career line against southpaws (.292/.424/.438) is actually better than his line against righties (.266/.394/.450), if only marginally so.

Yet Johnson, whose skills remained so undervalued that he did not even rate among MLB.com's recent assessment of the top three free agent first basemen, made only $5.5 million last year, largely due to durability questions. He'll get a deal loaded with incentives, with a high-end value around $8 million and a vesting option based on his ability to stay healthy.

That kind of bargain is one the Cubs might do well to exploit. Derrek Lee is coming off his first productive power season since 2005, and while Lee is certainly the better player of the two, he'll cost the team $13 million next year, possibly as much as twice Johnson's expected salary.

If the Cubs could persuade Lee to waive his no-trade clause and move him to a team like the New York Mets (that would presumably be more than able to pay Lee's full salary), they could save a bundle by signing Johnson, thereby opening up the budgetary flexibility General Manager Jim Hendry needs to fix the five or six gaping holes in Chicago's projected 2010 roster.

Lee is so tradable that Hendry could even expect the Mets to eat the full $13 million and still send back solid talent in return.

Johnson's fragility wouldn't be an issue because the Cubs could easily elect to keep both Micah Hoffpauir and Jake Fox, minimum-salary players who can be sent back and forth to the Minor Leagues without consequence for one more season each, as insurance, and to provide platoon help (Fox) or days off to ensure freshness (Hoffpauir).

This is a radical proposition. Chicagoans (this reporter included) are so attached to D-Lee that it is hard to imagine Hendry not re-signing the lanky slugger, let alone moving him before the end of his current deal. But the Cubs have too many different needs this offseason and beyond to focus on one guy that way.

Somehow, the overblown hype on shortstop prospect Starlin Castro has morphed into a grossly errant perception of the Cubs' Minor League system as well-stocked and ready to produce.

In fact, that system is just starting to produce Major League talent for the first time since the 1980s, and the best talents therein are still two or three years away from being viable big-leaguers.

No one player should ever be bigger than the organization, and so, as much as we all love Derrek Lee, it's time to look at the big picture and start building for present and future success.