Idiots Write About Sports

Over at USS Mariner, David Cameron takes four paragraphs to explain why Detroit’s gift to Magglio Ordonez of $75 million over the next five years may well be the worst free-agent signing in all of recorded history.

…even if [Ordonez] was healthy, we’d expect to him to be a little worse than the Nixon/Huff group of hitters, more comparable to Ibanez or Kevin Mench or Rondell White. And the Tigers just gave him a contract worth more than what Vladimir Guerrero received last offseason, more than J.D. Drew or Adrian Beltre received this offseason.

Meanwhile, over at ESPN, Peter Gammons takes a few more than four paragraphs to explain why the Tigers absolutely, positively had to shower Ordonez with undeserved riches:

The Ordonez contract is arguably as foolhardy a gamble as, say, buying a hockey team in Nashville. But Dombrowski’s regime hasn’t been in place long enough (highly respected scouting director David Chadd just arrived last fall) to build the farm system, so to compete they have to spend – and when Renteria, Beltre and Drew chose other teams, they were essentially left with Ordonez or no one.

Me, I fall on the side of bad, bad signing. Because anytime when the best possible of all outcomes is that your marquee free agent contract signing wind up on the DL for 25 days — thanks to BP’s Joe Sheehan for that tidbit — allowing you to get away with paying $6 million and giving you an out on the remainder of the contract, you have not negotiated yourself a shrewd deal.

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