Chasing Big Name Free Agents Could Hurt Nationals In the Long Run

As the Washington Nationals’ season begins to wind down—thankfully—our attention is drawn not to what has happened over the past few months but rather what will happen when the season ends.

Who will be released? Who will be traded? And perhaps most importantly, who will be signed as free agents?

Since taking over the franchise more than three years ago, the Lerner family has been labeled as “cheapskates,” the kind of owners who personally rummage through the litter at Nationals’ Park after games looking for nickels and dimes.

Forget for a moment that it is wholly untrue. They aren’t cheap. Just ask Adam Dunn.

They are prudent.

It would be very easy to throw money at every problem facing the team. Sometimes, teams find a perfect confluence of luck and perfect timing and a hired gun earns his contract. All too often, however, that hired gun becomes an assassin and kills the franchise.

To wit:

Just this week, Alex Rios, who has a “nice” .285-16-79 career 162-game average, was placed on waivers by the Toronto Blue Jays. Thinking Toronto would pull him back and then try to negotiate a trade, the Chicago White Sox place a claim for the outfielder.

I can still hear Blue Jays’ general manager J. P. Ricciardi singing, as he waved good bye to the Air Canada flight to Chicago, “Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, good bye!”

No trade. No haggling. It was a case of “You want him? You got him!”

It was just last year that Ricciardi signed Rios to a seven-year, $70 million contract. That’s $10 million a year for 16 homers and a career .335 on-base percentage.

Do you remember, just two weeks ago, Ricciardi said he was looking to trade pitcher Roy Halladay because the team didn’t have enough payroll “flexibility” to keep him long-term? It was Rios’ contract that created that problem.

From 1998 through 2003, Los Angeles Dodger third baseman Adrian Beltre played stellar defense and hit well enough, averaging .267-18-76. In 2004, he had a once-in-a-lifetime year, batting .334-48-121.

The Seattle Mariners, however, didn’t see it that way. They saw it as a breakout season (he was, after all, just 25) and signed Beltre to a five-year, $64 million contract.

In his five seasons with the Mariners, he’s returned to earth, averaging .267-20-82 and continued to play solid defense. But at more than $12 million per year, he was earning twice his value.

Every team has a similar horror story to tell. In the Nationals’ short history, our bombs have been less expensive, but just as questionable. Did anyone really think the signing of former Oriole Daniel Cabrera to a $2.5 million contract last winter made any sense?

Now let’s fast forward to the upcoming offseason.

There is going to be a desire—perhaps a demand—on the part of the fan base for the Lerner family to pull out that checkbook and start making millionaires.

But here is the problem: While the Nationals are not a small market per se, the team is not in the position to make a big financial mistake. If the Nationals tie up $50 or $60 million in a pitcher and receive, oh, I don’t know, Darren Driefort type numbers ($55 million for one healthy season), it will be a long time before the Nationals will be in the position to try again.

It was just three years ago that Aaron Rowand entered the free agent market after hitting .309-27-89 for the Philadelphia Phillies. Many Nationals’ fans—myself included—thought that Rowand would be the perfect answer to the teams’ ongoing center field problem.

He would have cost the Nationals the same five-year, $60 million contract that he got from the San Francisco Giants.

Rowand hit .271-13-70 in his first year with the Giants and is currently batting .272-9-45 for San Francisco.

And the Giants have three more years, and $36 million, before they can clear Rowand’s contract off of their books.

Let’s see, who would the Nationals rather have in center these days? Thirty-one year old Rowand and his .328 OBP/.436 SLG / .764 OPS at $12 million per year, or Nyjer Morgan, two years younger, with his .366 OBP / .409 OBP / .860 OPS for about $11.6 million less?

Teams like the Nationals have fans that want to win now and expect their team to do whatever it takes to turn things around. A few big contracts like the ones mentioned above would certainly placate the fan base, but would it help the team?

It’s a crap shoot. While there is a chance that the next big free agent signing could work out as well as Adam Dunn, it probably won’t. The Nationals might be better served by taking the less sexy route, that is, to find complementary role players like Nyjer Morgan through trades and minor free agent signings.

This is hard for me to say, because there was no louder voice for the do-it-quickly-and-at-any-cost way than me. But I’ve over time come over to the slowly-but-surely route. It’ll take longer, but the result will be a better team.